
CLARENCE -POEIi 




Book_ 






•Gopyiight]^^_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



WHERE HALF THE WORLD 
IS WAKING UP 




COUNT SHIGE-NOBU OKUMA OF JAPAN 

[From a photograph and autograph given the author) 
Count Okuma, one of the Genro or Elder Statesmen of Japan and 
ex-Premier of the Empire, is an opponent of his country's high pro- 
tective tariff and an earnest advocate of international arbitration 



WHERE HALF THE WORLD 
IS WAKING UP 



THE OLD AND THE NEW IN JAPAN, CHINA, THE 

PHILIPPINES, AND INDIA, REPORTED 

WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO 

AMERICAN CONDITIONS 

BY 

CLARENCE POE 

Avthor of " A Southerner in Europe" " Cotton: Its Cultivation 

and Manufacture" Editor " The Progressive Farmer" 

Sec'y North Carolina Historical Association, etc., etc. 




Garden City New Yosk 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1911 



6^<'to 



fS 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCH3DING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, XNCLUDING THE SCANTJINAVIAN 



COFYKIGBT, IQII, BY CLARENCE POE 




THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



©CI.A303506 



TO 
THE RIGHT HONORABLE 
^ JAMES BRYCE 



IN WHOM ACHIEVEMENT, CHARACTER AND PERSONAL CHARM 

MEET IN RARE SYMMETRY; WHO HAS WON THE WISDOM 

OF AGE WITHOUT LOSING THE DEW OF YOUTH; 

AND WHOSE GENEROUS FRIENDSHIP HAD MADE 

ME HIS DEBTOR BEFORE IT AIDED ME 

ANEW IN PLANNING AND EXECUTING 

MY ORIENTAL TOUR 



PREFACE 

THE human race, to which so many of my readers 
belong," as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton begins one of 
his books by saying, has half its members in Asia. 
That Americans should know something about so 
considerable a portion of our human race is manifestly worth 
while. And really to know them at all we must know them 
as they are to-day. 

Vast changes are in progress, and even as I write this, the 
revolution in China, foreshadowed in the chapters written by 
me from that country, is remaking the political life of 
earth's oldest empire. From Japan to India there is indus- 
trial, educational, political ferment. The old order changes, 
yielding place to the new. 

"Where Half the World is Waking Up" is not inappro- 
priate therefore as the title of the book now offered to the 
public. The reader will kindly observe here that I have writ- 
ten of where half the world is waking up and not merely 
of the waking-up itself. My purpose has been to set forth the 
old and the new in due proportion; to present the play of new 
forces against and upon the ancient, the amazingly ancient, 
forces that have dominated whole races for centuries. In most 
places, in fact, the ancient force is still clearly the dominant 
one. Observe, too, therefore, that I have written not of where 
half the world has waked up, but only of where it is waking up. 
The significant thing is that the waking is really taking 
place at all, and of this there can be no doubt. 

It was, in short, with the hope of securing for myself and 
presenting to others a photograph of the Orient as it is to-day 
that I made my long trip through Japan, Korea, Manchuria, 



viii PREFACE 

China, the Philippines, and India during the past year. It 
was not a pleasure trip nor yet a hurried "seaport trip." I 
travelled either entirely across or well into the interior of each 
country visited, and all my time was given to study and re- 
search to fit me for the preparation of these articles. 

That despite of the care exercised the book contains some 
errors, is doubtless true. The sources of information in the 
Orient are not always easy to find, nor always in accord 
after one finds them. Consider, for example, the population 
of Manchuria: it seems a simple enough matter, yet it required 
the help of consuls of two or three nations to enable me to sift 
out the truth from the conflicting representations of several 
writers and so-caUed authorities. 

For my part I can only claim a laborious and painstaking 
effort to get the facts. Letters of introduction to eminent 
Englishmen kindly furnished me by Ambassador Bryce opened 
the doors of British officialdom for me, and the friendship 
of Mr. Roosevelt and letters from Mr. Bryan and our Depart- 
ment of State proved helpful in other ways. I thus had the 
good fortune not only to get the ready fraternal assistance of 
my brother newspaper men (of all races) everywhere, and the 
help of English, German, and American consuls, but I was 
aided by some of the most eminent authorities in each country 
visited — in China, by H. E. Tang Shao-yi, Wu Ting Fang, 
Sir Robert Bredon, Dr. C. D. Tenney, Dr. Timothy Richard; 
in Japan, by ex-Premier Okuma, Viscount Kaneko, Baron 
Shibusawa, Dr. Juichi Soyeda; in Hong Kong, by Governor- 
General Sir Frederick Lugard; in Manila by Governor-General 
Forbes, Vice-Go vernor Gilbert; in India, the members of the 
Viceroy's Cabinet, Hon. Krishnaswami Iyer, Dr. J. P. Jones, 
etc., etc. To all of these and to scores of others, my grateful 
acknowledgments are tendered. They helped me get informa- 
tion, but of course are in no case to be held responsible for 
any opinions that I have expressed. 

To Mr. G. D. Adams, of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Arthur 



PREFACE ix 

Mez, of Mannheim, Germany, two generous fellow-travellers, 
my thanks are due for the use of many of their photographs, 
and I am also indebted to The World's Work and The Review of 
Reviews for permission to republish articles that have already 
appeared in these magazines. The larger number of chapters 
included in this volume, however, were originally prepared 
with a view to their use in my own paper. The Progressive 
Farmer. They are, therefore, often more elementary in char- 
acter, let me say in the outset, than if they had been written 
exclusively for bookbuyers, but it is my hope that their jour- 
nalistic flavor, even if it has this disadvantage, will also be 
found to have certain compensating qualities. 

Perhaps just one other thing ought to be said: that practi- 
cally every article about any country was written while I was 
still in the country described. In this way I hoped not only 
to write with greater freshness and vividness, but I was enabled 
to have my articles revised and criticised by friends well 
informed concerning the subjects discussed. The reader will 
please bear in mind, therefore, that a letter about Tokyo is 
also a letter from Tokyo, a letter about Korea is a letter from 
Korea, etc., and shift his viewpoint accordingly. I have also 
thought it best to be frank with the reader and let the chap- 
ters on China remain exactly as they were written — present- 
ing a pen picture of the Dragon Empire as it appeared on 
the eve of the outbreak, while the revolution was indeed 
definitely in prospect but not yet a reaUty. 



"Give us as many anecdotes as you can," was old Samuel 
Johnson's advice to Boswell, when that worthy proposed to 
write of Corsica; and this wise suggestion I have sought to 
keep in mind in all my travel. Moreover, another saying of 
the great lexicographer's comes quaintly into my memory as 
I conclude this Foreword: "There are two things which I am 
confident I could do very well," he once remarked to Sir Joshua 
Reynolds; "one is an introduction to any literary work stating 



X PREFACE 

what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most 
perfect manner: the other is a conclusion, showing from various 
causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author 
promised to himself and to the publick!" 

C. P. 
Raleigh, N. C. 

December 1, 1911. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Japan: The Land op Upside Down . . . S 

A Land of Contradictions — Music as an Example — 
Marriage and the Home Life — Patriarchal Ideas Still 
Dominant. 

II. Snapshots of Japanese Life and Philosophy 9 

What a Japanese City Is Like — Strange Clothing of the 
Japanese — Who Ever Saw So Many Babies? — Alphonse 
and Gaston Outdone — The Grace of the Little Women — 
How the Old Japan and the Old South Were Alike — A 
"Moral Distinction" Between Producers and Non- 
Producers. 

III. Japanese Farming and Farmer Folk . . 17 

Japanese Farm Children Getting More Schooling than 
American Farm Children — No Illiteracy in the New Japan 

— Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm — How Iowa Might 
Feed the Whole United States — Farming Without Horses 
or Oxen — What the Japanese Farmers Raise — The Crime 
of Soil-waste — All Work Done by Hand — Cooperative 
Credit Societies a Success — Farm Houses Grouped in Vil- 
lages — "A Seller of the Ancestral Land" — The Japanese 
Love of the Beautiful a Suggestion for America. 

rV. "Welfare Work" in Japanese Factories . 29 

Manufacturing Bound to Increase — Tariff Legislation 
Unfair to Agriculture — A Visit to a Progressive Japanese 
Factory — How the Factory Operatives Are Looked After 

— Stricter Factory Legislation Coming. 

V. Does Japanese Competition Menace the 

White Man's Trade 34 

A Study of Japanese Industrial Conditions — Japanese 
Labor Cheap but Inefficient — Actual Cost of Output 
Little Cheaper than in America — Laborers in a State of 



i CONTENTS 

^APTEB FAGS 

Deplorable Inexperience — Illustrations of Japanese IneiE- 
ciency — Some Current Misconceptions Corrected — Labor 
Wage Has Increased 40 Per Cent, in Eight Years — The 
Burden of Taxation — High Tariff Will Decrease Japan's 
Export Trade — Subsidy Policy Destroying Individual 
Initiative — Japanese Competition Not a Serious Menace 
to the White Man, 

VI. Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity m 

Japan 48 

The Artistic Touch of the Japanese — Religion With- 
out Morals — Buddhism in Fact vs. Buddhism Idealized 
by Arnold — Official Notices Prohibiting Christianity — 
Christianity "Puts Too High an Estimate on Woman" 
— The Worth of the Individual Not Recognized — The 
Elemental Significance of Japan's Awakening — A New 
Type of Civilization. 

VII. Korea: "The Land op the Morning Calm" 60 

I Have Become a Contemporary of David — The Fascina- 
tion of a Primitive City — Some Odd Korean Customs — 
A True Romance and an Odd One — Many Faces Marked 
by Smallpox — A Typical Monarchy of Ancient Asia — 
The Honorable Mr. Yang-ban — Six Men to Carry Fifty 
Dollars' Worth of Money — Japanese Annexation — Splen- 
did Work of Foreign Missionaries. 

VIII. Manchuria: Fair and Fertile .... 70 

Some First-hand Stories of the Russo-Japanese War — 
A Bit of History with a Lesson — The Site of the World's 
Next Great War — Manchuria: Fair and Fertile — Fat 
Harvests of Food, Feed, and Fuel — A Land Where Every- 
body "Knows Beans" — Golden Opportunities for Stock- 
raising — Better Plows and Level Culture — Graves as 
Thick as Corn Shocks 

IX. Where Japan Is Absorbing an Empire . . 78 

Manchuria the One Great Oriental Empire Not Yet 
Developed — Its Strategic Importance — Why the "Open 
Door" Concerns Us All — Japan's Shrewd Policies — Con- 



CONTENTS xiii 

JAPTBB PAGE 

tempt of Chinese Authority — Japan at Home vs. Japan in 
Manchuria — How the Open Door Policy Was Violated — 
Will Manchuria Go the Way of Korea? — A Bit of Chinese 
Wit and Wisdom — Truth Is in the Interest of Peace. 

X. Light FROM China ON Problems AT Home . . 93 

A Chinese Martyr-Hero — The Most Tremendous Moral 
Achievement of Recent Times — A Lesson for America — 
Putting Officials on Salaries — Money Changers and Title 
Changers — Making Education Practical — The Parcels 
Post and Tarifif Reform. 

XI. The New China: Awake and at Work. . 10^ 

The Coming National Parliament — The Successful War 
Against Opium — China's Right-about-face in Education 

— Building Up an Army — Attacking the Graft System 

— Railroads, Posts, and Telegraphs — • America's Rela- 
tions with China. 

XII. A Trip into Rural China 116 

The Camels from Mongolia — Strange Traffic and Travel 
in Nankou Pass — The Great Wall of China — Surpris- 
ingly Progressive Farming Methods. 

XIII. From Peking to the Yangtze-Kiang . . . 123 

Street Life in Peking — History That Is History — 
Martyrdoms That Have Enriched the World — Average 
Wages 15 to 18 Cents a Day — Homes Without Firesides — 
All China a Vast Cemetery — Keeping on Good Terms with 
Dragons — The Blessings of Our Alphabet — Confucius 
as a Moral Teacher — My Friendship with a Descendant 
of Confucius. 

XIV. Sidelights on Chinese Character and In- 

dustry ........... 132 

Healthy Public Sentiment — Slavery and Foot-binding 
Still Practised — "Big Feet No B'long Pretty"— -The 
Popularity of a No. 2 Wife — The Virtue That Is Next to 
Godliness Largely Disregarded — Some Discredited Ameri- 
cans Discovered Abroad — A 600-Mile Trip on the Yangtze 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

River — An Interview with Wu Ting Fang — Fanning 
on the Yangtze — Shanghai Factory Laborers Paid 12 Cents 
a Day. 

XV. Farewell to China 142 

A City of 2,000,000 People Without a Vehicle — A Dead 
Chinaman More Important and Respected Than a Live 
One — Queer Features of Chinese Funerals — Cruelty of 
Chinese Punishments — A Sample of Chinese Humor: 
The Story of the Magic Jar — Amusing Trials of a Land 
Buyer — "Pidgin English" — Everything Is Saved — The 
Influence That Is Remaking China. 

XVI. What I Saw in the Philippines .... 153 

In Manila — A Trip Through Five Provinces — What 
the PhiUppine Coimtry Looks Like — Every Filipino Has 
Cigarette and a Clean Suit — A Mania for Cock-fighting — 
Snapshots of Philippine Life — Labor the One Thing 
Lacking. 

XVII. What the United States Is Doing in the 

Philippines 163 

Thirty Thousand White People and 7,000,000 Filipinos 
— Rich Resources and Varied Products — Millions in 
Lumber — How the Islands Are Governed — Restricting 
the Suffrage — Education: Achievements of the American 
[ Government — Postal Savings Banks and the Torrens Sys- 
tem — Public Health Work — Building Roads — And 
Then Keeping Them Up — "A George Junior Repubhc." 

XVIII. Asia's Greatest Lesson for America . . 173 

Where 10 Cents a Day Is a Laborer's Wage — The Sav- 
age Struggle for Existence in the East — Tasks Heart-sick- 
ening in Their Heaviness — Where Women Are Burden- 
bearers — $12 a Year for a Farm Hand — An Overcrowded 
Population Not the Chief Cause of Asia's Poverty — A 
Defective Organization of Industry Responsible — Foolish 
Opposition to Labor-saving Tools — Our Debt to Machin- 
ery — Knowledge Itself a Productive Agency — Ineffective- 
ness of Oriental Labor — Tools and Knowledge the Secret 
of Wealth — Importance of Our Racial Heritage — The 
Final Lesson. 



CONTENTS XV 

CHAFTEB PAGE 

XIX. The Straits Settlements and Burma . . 186 

The Amazing Industry of the Chinese — Easy Money 
in Cocoanuts — How Germany Is Capturing Oriental 
Trade — Rangoon the City of Gorgeous Colors — Burma's 
Buddhist Temples — Rangoon's Beasts of Barden — Where 
the Elephants Do the Work — Some First-hand Jungle 
Stories — My Lord the Elephant — Good-by to Burma. 

XX. Hinduism — and the Himalayas .... 198 

Theoretical vs. Practical Hinduism — The Kalighat 
Temple, Calcutta — Human Sacrifices — Two Indian Places 
of Worship : A Contrast — A Visit to Benares — Burning 
the Bodies of the Dead — "Religion" as It Is in Benares 
— The Himalayas: A New and Happier Subject. 

XXI. "The Poor Benighted Hindus" . . . .210 

India's Enormous Population — "The Wealth of the 
Indies " a Romance — A Typical Indian Village — No 
Chairs, Mattresses, Knives, or Forks Used — Where It Is 
105 at Midnight — "Gunga Din" in Evidence — The 
Lady of Banbury Cross Outdone. 

XXII. Hindu Farming and Farm Life .... 218 

Primitive Tools Used by Farmers — WTiat Crops Are 
Grown — Where Drought Means Death — Reducing the 
Ravages of Famine — Usury and a Remedy — Where 
America Is Behind — Landowner and Farm Laborer — 
Salaam, O Little Folk! 

XXIII. The Caste System in India 226 

No Man May Rise Higher, but May Fall Lower — How 
Fatalism Sustains Caste — Contamination by Touch — A 
Bone Collector's Pride of Rank — The "Thief Caste" — 
Caste and the Banyan Tree — A Maharaja's Defence of 
Caste — Some Forces That Are Battering Down the Sys- 
tem — Foreign Travel Weakening Caste. 

XXIV. The Plight of the Hindu Woman . . . 236 

"Woman Is Not to Be Trusted" — Twelve-year-old 
Brides and Bridegrooms — A Wedding Procession in Agra 



cvi CONTENTS 

:haptee faqb 

— 6000 Rupees for a Wedding Feast — The Plight of the 
Child-wives — Cruel Treatment of Widows — The Pic- 
ture Not Wholly Dark — One Worthy Tribute to the Grace 
of Woman. 

XXV. More Leaves from an India Notebook . . 246 

Some Historic Indian Cities — India No More Homogene- 
ous than Europe — English Rule : An Interview with Mr. 
Krishnaswami Iyer — Indian Wealth in a Few Hands — 
16 Cents a Day an Incredibly High Wage — No Horses 
on Indian Farms — Bombay a Great Cotton Market — The 
Story of a Man-eater — A Snake Story to End With. 

XXVI. What the Orient May Teach Us . . . 261 

Conservation the Keynote — What Neglect of Her Forests 
Has Cost China — Forestry Lessons from Japan and Korea 

— Conserving Individual Wealth — The Essential Im- 
morality of Waste — Avoiding the Wastes of War — Pre- 
serving Our Physical Stamina and Racial Strength — A 
Lesson from China — Patriotism as a Moral Force — The 
Coming "Conflict of Color" — Oriental vs. Occidental 
Ideals. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Count Shige-Nobu Okuma of Japan - - - - Frontispiees 

PAGE ,^. 

The Giant Avenue of Cryptomerias at Nikko - - - 13 ^^ 

Typical Japanese Costumes and Temple Architecture - 14 

Japanese Farming Scenes --- 19 

Japanese School Children ---------- 20 

The Great Buddha (Diabutsu) at Kamakura - - - - 53 

The Degenerate Koreans at Rest and at Work - - - 54 

Like Scenes from Our Western Prairies ----- 81 

Manchurian Women (showing peculiar head-dress) - - 82' 

Chinese Waste-paper Collector - 82 

Pu Yi the Son of Heaven and Emperor of the Middle ^ 

Kingdom -- 105 ' 

How China Is Dealing with Opium Intemperance - - 106 

A Man-made Desert 117 

Pumping Water for Irrigation ---------117 

Transportation and Travel in China- ------ 118 

Fashionable Chinese Dinner Party ------- 137 

How Lumber Is Sawed in the Orient - 137 

A Quotation from Confucius --------- 138 

The Great Wall of China 147 

Chinese Woman's Ruined Feet ._- 147 '^ 

Chinese School Children .-..-- 148 

The American Consulate at Antung 148 

A FiHpino's Home 157 ' 

The Carabao, the Work-stock of the Filipinos - - - 158 ''^ 

An Old Spanish Cathedral 158 "^ 

Society Belles of Mindanao, Philippine Islands - - - 181 

A Street Scene in Manila ---------- 181 

zvii 



xviii ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Two Kinds of Workers in Burma ------- 182 

Types at Darjeeling, Northern India, and at Delhi, Cen- 
tral India - 205 

Two Rangoon Types ------------ 206 "' 

A Hindu Faquir --. 213 , 

Some Fashionable Hindus ---------- 213 ^ 

Hindu Children -------------- 214 

The Taj Mahal from the Entrance Gate 241'^^ 

Gunga Din on Dress Parade --------- 242 ' 

Bathing in the Sacred Ganges at Benares ----- 249 

The Battle-scarred and World-famous Residency at 

Lucknow -------------- 250 

Burning the Bodies of Dead Hindus ------ 255 - 

An Indian Camel Cart ----------- 255*^ 

Travel in India - - - 256 ''' 



WHERE HALF THE WORLD 
IS WAKING UP 



JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN 

I CANNOT help thinking," said one of my friends to me 
when I left home, "that when you get over on the other 
side of the world, in Japan and China, you will have to 
walk upside down like the flies on the ceiling!" 

While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is 
true, as Mr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard 
to the manners and customs of the people, everything is re- 
versed, and the surest way to go right is to take pains to go 
dead wrong! "To speak backward, write backward, read 
backward, is but the A B C of Oriental contrariety." 

Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have 
come to Japan. 

I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at 
what with us would be the back of a book or paper and read 
toward the front; and it is said that no European or Amer- 
ican ever gets used to the construction of a Japanese sen- 
tence, considered merely from the standpoint of thought- 
arrangement. I had noticed that the Japanese usually ended 
their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before I 
learned that with them the subject of a sentence usually 
comes last (if at all), as for example, "By a rough road 
yesterday came John," instead of, "John came by a rough 
road yesterday." 

And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that 
might be given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down," 
the land of contradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That 



4 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Japan is a land "where the flowers have no odor and the birds 
no song" has passed into a proverb that is almost literally 
true; and similarly, the far-famed cherry blossoms bear no 
fruit. The typesetters I saw in the Kokumin Shimbum office 
were singing like birds, but the field-hands I saw at Komaba 
were as silent as church-worshippers. The women carry 
children on their backs and not in their arms. The girls dance 
with their hands, not with their feet, and alone, not with 
partners. An ox is worth more than a horse. The people bathe 
frequently, but in dirty water. The people are exceptionally 
artistic, yet the stone "lions" at Nikko Temple look as much 
like bulldogs as lions. A man's birthday is not celebrated, 
but the anniversary of his death is. The people are immeasur- 
ably polite, and yet often unendurably cocky and conceited. 
Kissing or waltzing, even for man and wife, would be improper 
in public, but the exposure of the human body excites no 
surprise. The national government is supposed to be modern, 
and yet only 2 per cent, of the people — the wealthiest — can 
vote. Famed for kindness though the people are, war cor- 
respondents declared the brutality of Japanese soldiers to the 
Chinese at Port Arthur such as "would damn the fairest 
nation on earth." Though the nation is equally noted for sim- 
plicity of living, it is a Japanese banker, coming to New York, 
who breaks even America's record for extravagance, by giving a 
banquet costing $40 a plate. The people are supposed to be 
singularly contented, and yet Socialism has had a rapid growth. 
The Emperor is regarded as sacred and almost infallible, 
and yet the Crown Prince is not a legitimate son. Although 
the government is one of the most autocratic on earth, it has 
nevertheless adopted many highly "paternalistic" schemes — 
government ownership of railways and telegraphs, for example. 
'The people work all the time, but they refuse to work as 
strenuously as Americans. The temples attract thousands of 
people, but usually only in a spirit of frolic : in the first Shinto 
temple I visited the priests offered me sake (the national liquor) 



JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN 5 

to drink. Labor per day is amazingly cheap, but, in actual 
results, little cheaper than American labor. 

It is amid such a maze of contradictions and surprises that 
one moves in Japan. When I go into a Japanese home, for 
example, it is a hundred times more important to take off my 
shoes than it is to take off my hat — even though, as happened 
this week when I called on a celebrated Japanese singer, there 
be holes in my left sock. (But I was comforted later when 
I learned that on President Taft's visit to a famous Tokyo 
teahouse his footwear was found to be in like plight.) 

Speaking of music, we run squarely against another oddity, 
in that native Japanese (as well as Chinese) music usually 
consists merely of monotonous twanging on one or two strings 
— so that I can now understand the old story of Li Hung Chang's 
musical experiences in America. His friends took him to hear 
grand opera singers, to listen to famous violinists, but these 
moved him not; the most gifted pianists failed equally to in- 
terest him. But one night the great Chinaman went early to 
a theatre, and all at once his face beamed with delight, and he 
turned to his friends in enthusiastic gratitude: "We have found 
it at last!" he exclaimed. "That is genuine music!" . . . 
And it was only the orchestra "tuning up" their instruments! 

I might as well say just here that this story, while good, 
always struck me as a humorous exaggeration till I came to 
Japan, but the music which I heard the other night in one of 
the most fashionable and expensive Japanese restaurants in 
Tokyo was of exactly the same character — like nothing else in 
all the world so much as an orchestra tuning up! And yet by 
way of modification (as usual) it must be said that appreciation 
of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in classical 
selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than Mrs. 
Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also 
surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time 
American favorites like a genuine Southerner. 

Take the social relations of the Japanese people as another 



6 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

example of contrariety. Here the honorable sex is not the 
feminine but the masculine. There is even a proverb, I be- 
lieve, "Honor men, despise women." Perhaps the translation 
"despise" is too strong, but certainly it would be regarded as 
nothing but contemptible weakness for young men to show 
any such regard for young women, or husbands for their wives, 
as is common in America. The wives exist solely for their 
husbands, nor must the wife object if the husband maintains 
other favorites, or even brings these favorites into the home 
with her. And although a man is with his wife a much greater 
part of his time than is the case in America, he may have little 
or no voice in selecting her; in fact, he may see her only once 
before marrying. 

After having seen probably half a million or more Japanese, 
Sundays and week-days, I have not noticed a single young 
Japanese couple walking together, and in the one case where 
I saw a husband and a wife walking thus side by side I dis- 
covered on investigation that the man was blind ! 

"For a young couple to select each other as in America," 
said a young Japanese gentleman to me, "would be considered 
immoral, and as for a young man calling on a young woman, 
that never happens except clandestinely." And when I asked if 
it was true that when husband and wife go together the woman 
must follow the man instead of walking beside him as his 
equal, he answered: "But it is very, very seldom that the two 
go out together." 

My Japanese friend also told me that the young man often 
has considerable influence in selecting his life-partner (in case 
it is for life: there is one divorce to every three to five marriages), 
but the young woman has no more voice in the matter than the 
commodity in any other bargain-and-sale. When a young 
man or young woman gets of marriageable age, which is 
rather early, the parents decide on some satisfactory prospec- 
tive partner, and a "middleman" interviews the parents of 
the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing, and 



JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN 7 

financial and other considerations are satisfactory, it doesn't 
matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whether 
young Barkis himself is "willin'." The Sir Anthony Abso- 
lutes in Japan indeed brook no opposition. All of which, while 
not wholly commendable (my young Japanese friend himself 
dislikes the plan, at least in his own prospective case), has at 
least the advantage of leaving but remarkably few bachelors 
and old maids in Japan. Here every man's house may not 
be his castle, but it is certainly his nursery. Usually, too, in 
the towns at least, his home is his shop; the front part full of 
wares, with no hard and fast dividing line between merchandise 
rooms and the living rooms, children being equally conspicuous 
and numerous in both compartments. 

Japan is still governed largely on patriarchal lines. The 
Emperors themselves depend largely on the patriarchal spirit 
for their power, claiming direct descent in unbroken line from 
the Sun-Goddess, while the people are supposed to be them- 
selves descendants of Emperors or of minor gods. In family 
life the patriarchal idea is still more prominent, the father 
being the virtual ruler until he abdicates in favor of the eldest 
son. 

Ancestor-worship is general, of course, and a typical case 
is that of my young Nikko friend, who tells me that in his 
home are memorial tablets to six of his most recently deceased 
ancestors, and that hot rice is placed before these tablets each 
morning. Now the teaching is that the spirits of the dead 
need the odor of the rice for nourishment, and also require 
worship of other kinds. Consequently the worst misfortune 
that can befall a man is to die without heirs to honor his memory 
(the mere dying itself is not so bad); and if an oldest son die 
unmarried such action amounts almost to treason to the family. 

Moreover, if a man be without sons (daughters don't count), 
he may adopt a son; and the cases of adoption are surprisingly 
frequent. Count Okuma, ex-prime minister of the empire, 
whom I visited last Sunday, adopted his son-in-law as his 



8 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING IIP 

legal son. A distinguished banker I visited is also an adopted 
son; and in a comparatively brief list of eminent Japanese, a 
sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who," I find perhaps 
twenty cases in which these eminent officials and leaders have 
been adopted and bear other family names than those with 
which they were bom. 

The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed 
in the light of the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors 
and family name, is only another illustration of Japanese 
contrariety. It is a land of surprises. 

Miyanoshita, Japan. 




n 

SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 

'HAT is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "sup- 
pose," as the children say. You know the Amer- 
ican city nearest you, or the one you live in. 

Suppose then you should wake up in this city 
to-morrow morning and find in the first place that forty-nine 
people out of every fifty have put on such unheard-of clothing 
as to make you rub your eyes in wonder as to whether you 
are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has become six 
inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot 
men and four-foot women have unanimously developed most 
violent sunburn — have become bronzed almost beyond 
recognition. 

Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all dis- 
appeared, and a wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story 
houses has taken their places, wherein the first story, even 
in two-story buildings, is so low that all your new brown 
friends warn you by a gesture to duck your head as you go 
through the doors, while the second story is usually little more 
than a garret. 

Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear 
and you discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred 
have forgotten how to speak English. More than this, the 
English signs are no more, and on the billboards and before 
the business offices are marks that look as if a thousand ostriches 
fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been set to scratching 
new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up a book 

d 



10 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened — pig 
tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically 
tied instead of English type — and everybody begins at the 
back of the book and reads toward him instead of reading the 
way you have grown used to! 

And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth 
has become of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but 
dozens or scores of men with bare legs and odd clothes, each 
flying around pulling a light two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a 
woman seated in each man-drawn "buggy"; and there are 
dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously pulling heavy 
loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant tele- 
graph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and for- 
get your strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your 
surroundings till a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Ba- 
laam when the ass spoke to him! 

By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people 
are dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something 
like this : 

Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a 
modern American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and 
several thousand seashore bathers have all thrown their 
clothes — (or the lack of them !) — into one tremendous pile, 
and everybody has rushed in pell-mell and put on the first 
thing, or the first two or three things, that came to hand. 
There is every conceivable type of clothing, but perhaps the 
larger number have wound up with something like a light 
bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted over 
it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese 
say, "Shikata na gai" (All right; it can't be helped). In the 
shops and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own 
integrity and a loin-cloth, and both children and grown people 
dress with a hundred times more disregard of convention than 
the negroes in America. 

Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing, 



SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 11 

but the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy 
weather at least) have compromised on the "getas," a sort of 
wooden sole strapped on the foot, with wooden pieces put 
fore and aft the instep, these pieces throwing the foot and sole 
about three inches above ground. It looks almost as difficult 
to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the people go, 
young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange 
footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mow- 
ing-machines had passed along! In most cases the clatter 
of the "get as" is the loudest noise on the streets, for the Japa- 
nese are remarkably quiet: in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand 
of them waiting to see the Empiess, and an American crowd 
would literally have made more noise in a minute than they 
made in an hour. 

On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the 
people take oflf their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer 
footwear is used — for the very good reason that the people 
sit on the floor (on mats or on the floor itself), eat on the 
floor (very daintily, however), and sleep on the floor, so that to 
walk over the floor here with muddy feet would be the same as 
if an American should walk roughshod over his chairs, table 
and bed. Even in the Japanese department store I visited 
this morning cloth covers were put on my shoes, and this 
afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to go 
in my stocking feet. 

Then the babies — who ever saw as many babies to the 
square inch? About 10 per cent; of the male population seems 
to be hauling other men, but 50 per cent, of the female popula- 
tion seems hardly enough to carry the wise and happy-looking 
little Jap babies — not in go-carts (a go-cart or a hired nurse 
is almost never seen), but on the back. And these little women 
who when standing are only about as tall as you are when 
sitting — they seem hardly more than children themselves, 
so that you recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot 
child walks with a three-foot child, who is holding the hand 



12 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

of a two-foot child, who carries on her back a one-foot 
child." 

Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their 
backs in the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and 
after work- time the father takes a turn at the same business. 
You are reminded of the negro who said to another: " 'Fo Gawd, 
Bill, you's got the mos' chillun any nigger I ever seed. Why, 
I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' at nine erclock and throwed 
a brick on top and hollered Tiah!' an' at five erclock in the 
evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" It seems some- 
times as if such an incident, with Jap children substituted 
for negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually 
happen in Japan. 

And those two men bowing to each other as they meet — 
are they rehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy 
show to-night, or are they serious? No, they are serious, for 
yonder is another pair meeting in the same way, and yonder 
another couple separating with even more violent "convulsions 
of politeness ' ' — and nobody laughing but yourself. No wonder 
the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a few friends 
a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim ! Look again : 
those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there are 
familiar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger 
cars amid all these strange surroundings). There is the 
woman with her hair combed straight back, which, I am told, 
means that she is a widow; one with an odd Japanese topknot, 
which means that she is married, and a younger one whose hair 
is arranged in the style of unmarried girls; and though they are 
evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace and kiss at 
meeting — to kiss in public would be shocking to the Japanese 
— and you can only guess the depth of their affection by the 
greater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another. 

They are trained in politeness from their youth up, are these 
Japanese; and it is perhaps the greatest charm of both young 
and old, I must have seen a full hundred thousand Japanese 




THE GIANT AVENUE OF < UYPTOMEHIA.S AT NIKKO 
This magnificent avenue, twenty-five miles in length, consists of trees planted 
by daimyos, or small lords, as a memorial to the great Japanese warrior and 
statesman, lyeyasu. A spirit of simplicity and love of nature has produced 
a nobler monument than extravagance could possibly have done 




TYPICAL JAPANESE COSTUMES AND TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE 

In the temple picture notice also how the limbs of the trees have been trained 
Many fantastic effects are often produced in this way 



SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 15 

by this time, and I do not recall one in the attitude of scolding 
or abuse, while authorities tell me that the Japanese language 
simply has no words to enable one to swear or curse. I was 
also interested to have the American Ambassador here tell me 
that in all his three years' stay in Japan, and with all the 
freedom with which a million children run about the streets 
and stores, he has never seen a man impatient with a child. 
At the Imperial University yesterday morning I noticed two 
college boys part with the same deep courtesy used by the 
older men, and the little five-year-old girl near Chuzenji the 
other day thanked me for my gift with the most graceful of 
Eastern salaams. 

I shall not say that the excessive ceremoniousness of the men 
does not at times seem ludicrous, but when you come to your 
hotel dining-room, and the inexpressibly dainty little Japanese 
girls, moving almost noiselessly on their sandaled feet (no getas 
indoors) welcome each guest with smiling bows, happy, refined 
and graceful, a very different impression of Japanese courtesy 
comes over you. In America, unfortunately, the like cour- 
teous attention under such circumstances might be misinter- 
preted, but here you are only reminded of how a thousand years 
of courtesy and gentle manners have given the women of 
Japan — pretty though they are not, judged by our Western 
standards — an unsurpassed grace of manner and happiness 
of disposition together with Shakespeare's well-praised "voice, 
soft and low, an excellent thing in woman." 

And here and everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with 
the overcoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more power- 
ful in compelling deference than all the stormy strength of 
the "new woman".? 

Which reminds me that however much the social, political, 
and economic revolution of the last forty years may have 
changed the national character (and upon this point I shall 
not speak till later), it is certain that Old Japan and the Old 
South were distinguished for not a few characteristics in 



16 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

common. For example, we are reminded of the South's ante- 
bellum civilization when we learn that in old Japan "the 
business of money-making was held in contempt by the su- 
perior classes," and of all forms of business, agriculture was 
held in highest esteem. Next to the nobility stood the Samurai, 
or soldier class, the social rank of all other persons then being 
as follows: (1) farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And 
farming was thus not only regarded as the most honorable 
of all occupations, but farmers in the early ages were privi- 
leged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next to the nobility. 
Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while as 
Lafcadio Hearn tells us: 

"The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, 
and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially recognized. The business 
of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes; and all methods 
of profiting by the purchase and resale of the produce of labor were regarded 
as dishonorable. . , . There is a generally, in militant society, small 
respect for the common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation 
of the farmer and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been 
considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a moral one." 

I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we have 
realized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and 
essential "morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming 
and manufacturing above trade as occupations? Morally and 
economically considered, it is the men who actually produce 
wealth rather than those men who trade or barter in the products 
of other men's labor who deserve most honor. They serve the 
world best : The barterers are, in limited numbers, necessary 
and useful servants of those who do produce, but the strength 
of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are really creators 
of values. 

ToIq'^o, Japan. 



Ill 

JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 

I WENT yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Im- 
perial University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near 
Tokyo, where I had an appointment with Director 
Matsui. My purpose was to get further information 
concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and 
Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought 
out was not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or 
any other field product of the Mikado's empire. 

Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the 
most important of all crops — the crop of boys and girls. And 
the big fact I discovered was simply this: 

These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we 
opened to civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought 
of but yesterday as backward "heathen" — they are getting, 
as a general proposition, just twice as much schooling as is 
furnished pupils in many of our American rural districts : their 
parents are providing, in their zeal for their children's welfare, 
just twice as good educational facilities as we are giving many 
of our white farm boys and girls — boys and girls who have in 
their veins the blood of a race which has carried the flag of 
human progress for a thousand years, and whom we are ex- 
pecting to continue leaders in civilization and enlightenment. 

In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to- 
day to the Japanese National Department of Education to 
verify the fact), the Japanese farm boys and girls are getting 
ten months' schooling a year, while the farm boy or girl in 

17 



18 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

my own state is getting only five or six months — and when I 
was in a country school fifteen years ago, not nearly so much 
as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the Japanese 
educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and 
girls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell 
him how we compare in the matter of utilizing school advan- 
tages, when he showed me that of all the children between 
six and fourteen in all the empire of Japan the school 
attendance is 98 per cent. — 98 out of every 100 children of 
"school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99 
out of every 100! Thirty -five years ago the average school 
attendance in Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by 
the time of the war with Russia it had passed 90, and since then 
has been climbing straight and steadily toward the amazing 
maximum itself, the official figures showing a gain of 1 per 
cent, a year — 94 per cent., then 95, then 96, then 97, and now 
98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99 or 100, as they 
told me to-day. 

When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, further- 
more, that Japan is so intent upon educating every boy and 
girl in her borders that she compels attendance on the public 
schools for eight years, I didn't tell him that in civilized 
America, in the great enlightened nation so long held up to 
him as a model, demagogues and others in many states on 
one pretext or another have defeated every effort for effective 
compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents are in- 
different to his future, the state does not compel them to give 
him a fighting chance in life — for the state's own sake and 
for the boy's. 

With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make 
any vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of 
our own states these last twenty years : However much prog- 
ress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have 
beaten us. While there is no official census on the question 
of illiteracy here, every Japanese man in his twenties must serve 





JAPANESE FARMING SCENES 

h..ilJfn7^^'"/'^^''^ '^°T', ^^^^f ^^^^ '"^ ^^^ foreground, tea alongside the 
buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also an 
unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows 
tne work ot transplanting rice 




JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN 
Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system of 
compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of the children of 
school age" attend. Even the country schools run ten months in the year — 
longer than in a majority of our states 



JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 21 

two years in the army (unless he is in a normal school studying 
to be a teacher), and a record is made as to the literacy or 
illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a place 
where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be 
recorded, but the Department of Education informed me 
to-day that the illiterate column is now absolutely blank. 

There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation. 

More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty 
that the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in 
our plenty. We waste more in a year than they make. Even 
with a hundred acres of land the American farmer is likely to 
consider himself poor, but when I asked my Japanese guide 
the other day if two cho (five acres) would be an average 
sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man 
would be regarded as a middle-class farmer — a rather large 
farmer.'' And the figures which I have just obtained in a 
call on the national Department of Agriculture and Commerce 
more than justify the reply. 

Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than 
one and one quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own 
less than two and one half acres, and only one man in a hundred 
owns as much as twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation 
also I find that 70 per cent, cultivate less than two and one 
half acres, and nearly half are tenants.) 

This year the situation is even worse than usual, for dis- 
astrous floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one 
half Japan's crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, 
and many people will suffer. 

Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief -sized farms 
yield amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that 
the fields of Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so 
painstakingly, and kept so continuously producing some crop, 
that they feed 2277 people to the square mile — 21,321 square 
miles of cultivated fields in the main islands supporting a 
population of 48,542,376. If the tilled fields of Iowa, for 



22 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

example, supported an equal number of people per square mile, 
the population so supported would be over 100,000,000. That 
state alone could feed the entire population of the United 
States and then have an excess product left for export to other 
countries! If North Carolina did as well with her cultivated 
land she would support 30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's 
11,875 square miles of land under cultivation supported each 
2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people, or thirteen times the 
present population of the state, could live off their produce! 

And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for 
unnumbered centuries. Some of them may have been cleared 
when King Herod trembled from his dream bi a new-born rival 
in Judea, and certainly "the glory that was Greece and the 
grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the earth when 
some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human 
need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer 
putting back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from 
it, for commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until 
our own generation. 

Of course, with a population so dense and with each man 
cultivating an area no larger than a garden-patch in America, 
the people are poor, and the wonder is that they are able to 
produce food enough to keep the country from actual want. 
Practically no animal meat is eaten; if we except fish, the 
average American eats nearly twice as much meat in a week 
as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds 
of meat per capita is required per year for the average American 
against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the 
farmers here are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. 
Consequently Japan presents the odd phenomenon of being 
at once an exporter and a large importer of rice. Poor farmers 
sell their good rice and buy a poorer quality brought in from 
the mainland of Asia and mix it with barley for grinding. 

Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most 
cases all the work must be done by hand and with crude tools. 



JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 23 

It is pitiful — or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they 
did not appear so contented — to see men breaking the ground 
not by plowing but by digging with kuwas : long-handled tools 
with blades perhaps six inches wide and two feet long. At 
the Agricultural College farm in Komaba I saw about thirty 
Japanese weeding rice with the kama — a tool much like an 
old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right 
hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and the 
left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like 
kamas about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking 
corn: they are at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was 
interested to notice! 

With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep some- 
thing on the ground every growing day from year's end to 
year's end. Truckers and gardeners raise three crops a year. 
Rice, as a rule, is not sown as with us, but the plants are trans- 
planted as we transplant cabbage or tomato plants (but so 
close together, of course, that the ripening fields look as if 
they had been sown), in order that the farmer may save the 
time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage. 
That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while 
the rice plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding 
through the country almost anywhere you will notice the tender 
young plants of some new crop showing between the rows of 
some earlier-planted crop now maturing or newly harvested. 

The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents 
half the agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm 
industry, and then barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet 
potatoes, and fruits. There is especial interest in fruit grow- 
ing just now. Sweet potatoes grow more luxuriantly than in 
any other country I have ever seen, and are much used for 
food, I have seen one or two little patches of cotton, but 
evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said 
that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Jap- 
anese territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much 



24 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

cultivated plant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water- 
lily, is the taro, which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots 
are used for food as potatoes are. 

Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is 
religiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand 
for commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per 
acre being a normal application. 

So much for the farming country as it has impressed me 
around Tokyo. A few days ago I saw a somewhat different 
agricultural area — 280 miles of great rice-farming land be- 
tween Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country is different 
from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it is 
so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, 
supreme among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater 
efforts are therefore necessary to take care of the soil. 

But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be 
made. The population is so dense that every one realizes 
the essential criminality of soil- waste, of the destruction of the 
one resource which must support human life as long as the 
race shall last. 

Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, 
tiers. That is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from 
eighteen inches to six feet higher (all as level as a threshing- 
floor) than a similar level piece adjoining. While the levelling 
is helpful in any case for the preservation of fertility and the 
prevention of washing, the tier system is necessary in many 
cases on account of the irrigation methods used in rice growing. 
While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland crops may be 
growing on the adjacent elevated acre or haff-acre. 

The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the 
last available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the 
men and women carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering 
crop. In nearly all cases the rows are on a level. Where there 
was once a slanting hillside the Japanese here dig it down or 
grade it, and the mountainsides are often enormous steps or 



JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 25 

stairs; one level terrace after another, each held in place by 
turf or rock wall. 

Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls 
for much bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into 
the muddy, miry, water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk 
must wade, to plant the rice laboriously, plant by plant; then 
the cultivation and harvesting is also done by hand, and even 
the threshing, I understand. When we recall that the net re- 
sult of all this bitter toil is only a bare existence made increas- 
ingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and that the 
Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which 
give joy and color to American and English country life, it is 
no wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and 
three acre plots, too small to produce a decent living for a 
family, to try their fortunes in the factories and the towns. 
Specifically, it may be mentioned that the boys from the 
farms who go into the army for the compulsory two years' 
service are reported as seldom returning to the country. 

True, the government is trying to help matters to some 
extent (though this is indeed but little) by lending money to 
banks at low rates of interest with the understanding that the 
farmers may then borrow from these banks at rates but little 
higher; and there are also in most communities, I learn, "co- 
operative credit societies" (corresponding somewhat to the 
mutual building and loan societies in American towns), by 
means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shy- 
lock money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 
20 to 30 per cent, for advances. The Japanese farmers invest 
their surplus funds in these "cooperative credit societies," 
just as they would in savings banks, except that in their case 
their savings are used solely for helping their immediate neigh- 
bors and neighborhoods. A judicious committee passes 
upon each small loan, and while the interest rates might seem 
high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here 
commands higher intei:est than in America. 



26 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

I am the more interested in these "cooperative credit so- 
cieties," because they seem to me to embrace features which 
our American farmers would do well to adopt. 

It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had 
twenty years ago, but I should think that there has been little 
improvement in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they 
live. These houses are grouped into small villages, as are 
the farm houses in Europe, the farmer going out from the set- 
tlement to his fields each working day, much after the fashion 
of the workers on the largest American plantations. Build- 
ings corresponding to our American two-story houses are almost 
never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming 
sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually con- 
sisting of a story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered 
sash between the rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the 
meals are cooked, and no chimney — little better, though 
much cleaner, than the negro cabins in the South. In 
winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the fact 
that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile 
on cotton padding until they look almost like walking 
feather beds. 

True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear 
that my average reader would get a very gloomy and false 
conception of Japanese farm life if I should stop here. The 
truth is that, so far as my observation goes, I have seen noth- 
ing to indicate that the rural population of Japan is not now 
as happy as the rural population in America. If their posses- 
sions are few, so are their wants. In fact. Dr. Juichi Soy- 
eda, one of the country's leading men, in talking to me, ex- 
pressed a doubt as to whether the new civilization of Japan 
will really produce greater average happiness than the old rural 
seclusion and isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not 
share). "Our farm people," he said, "are hard-working, 
frugal, honest, cheerful, and while their possessions are 
small, there is little actual want among them. A greater 



JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK 27 

number than in most other countries are home-owners, and, 
altogether, they form the backbone of an empire." 

Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy illustration of 
the affection of the people for their home farms. "The Jap- 
anese," he said, "have a term of contempt for the man who 
sells an old homestead." There is no English word equivalent 
to it, but it means "a seller of the ancestral land," and to say 
it of a man is almost equivalent to reflecting upon his character 
or honor! I wish that we might develop in America such 
a spirit of affection for our farm homes. 

I wish, too, that we might develop the Japanese love of the 
beautiful in nature. No matter how small and cramped the 
yard about the tiny home here, you are almost sure to find 
the beauty of shrub and tree and neatly trimmed hedge, and 
in Tokyo the whole population looks forward with connoisseur- 
like enthusiasm to the season for wistaria blooms in earliest 
spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, to lotus-time in 
mid-summer, and to the chrysanthemum shows in the fall. The 
fame of Tokyo's cherry blossoms has already gone around the 
world, and thus they not only add to the pleasure of its citi- 
zens, but give the city a distinction of no small financial advan- 
tage as well. 

Why may not our civic improvement associations, women's 
clubs, etc., get an idea here for our American towns? A long 
avenue of beautiful trees along a road or street, even if trees 
without blossoms, would give distinction to any small village 
or to any farm. Every one who has been to Europe will 
recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that make the fair 
vision of many French roads linger long in the memory, and I 
can never forget the magnificent avenue of cryptomerias — 
gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the cedars of 
Lebanon — that line the road leading to the great Shogun 
lyeyasu's tomb in Nikko. 

Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better 
day is coming, Their children are going to school, as the 



28 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

older folk could not, and as a Japanese editor said to me 
this week: 

"Every boy in the empire believes he may some day be- 
come Premier!" 

What is the lesson of it all? Is it not just this: That we 
in America should feel highly favored in that we have such 
magnificent resources, and yet as sharply rebuked in that we 
are doing so little with them. 

And most of all, is there not need for us to emulate the 
broad patriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which 
the Land of the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is provid- 
ing ten-months schools for every boy and girl in all its borders? 
And, indeed, how otherwise can we make sure, before it is too 
late, that our American farm boys and girls will not be out- 
distanced in twentieth-century achievement by the children 
of a people our fathers regarded only as hopeless "heathen?" 

Tokyo, Japan. 



IV 

"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES 

THE obvious truth is that the agricultural population 
of Japan is too congested. It is a physical impos- 
sibility for a people to live in genuine comfort 
on such small pocket-handkerchief pieces of land, 
even though their standards do not call for shoes or tables, beds 
or chairs. Western houses or Western clothing. The almost 
exclusive use of hand labor, too, is uneconomic, seen from a 
large standpoint, and it would seem that in future farmers 
must combine, as they are already beginning to do, in order to 
purchase horses and horse-power tools to be used in common 
by a number of farmers. In the Tokyo Seed, Plant & Imple- 
ment Company store the other day I saw a number of widely 
advertised American tools, and the manager told me the demand 
for them is increasing. 

Thus with a smaller number of men required to produce 
the nation's food, a larger number may engage in manufactur- 
ing, and gradually the same principle of division of labor which 
has brought Western people to high standards of living, com- 
fort, and earning power will produce much the same result in 
Japan. Already wages, astonishingly low as they are to-day 
to an ordinary American, have increased 40 per cent, in the 
last eight or ten years, this increase being partly due to the 
general cheapening of money the world over, and partly also 
to the increased efficiency of the average laborer. 

Unfortunately, however, Japan is not content to rely upon 
natural law for the development of its manufactures. Adam 



30 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Smith said in his "Wealth of Nations" (published the year of 
our American Declaration of Independence), that the policy 
of all European nations since the downfall of the Roman 
Empire had been to help manufacturing, the industry of the 
towns, rather than agriculture, the industry of the country — 
a policy in which America later imitated Europe. Japan now 
follows suit. For a long time the government has paid enor- 
mous subsidies to shipbuilding and manufacturing corporations, 
and now a high tariff has been enacted, which wiU still further 
increase the cost of living for the agricultural classes, compris- 
ing, as they do, two thirds of the country's population. 

"With your cheap labor and all the colossal Oriental market 
right at your door," I said to Editor Shihotsu of the Kohumin 
Shimbun a day or two ago, "what excuse is there for further 
dependence on the government? What can be the effect of 
your new tariff except to increase the burdens of the farmer for 
the benefit of the manufacturer.'*" And while defending the 
policy, he admitted that I had stated the practical effect of 
the policy. "They are domestic consumption duties," was 
his phrase; and Count Okuma, one of the empire's ablest men, 
once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointed out how injuri- 
ously the new law will affect the masses of the people. 

"Some would argue," he said in a speech at Osaka, "that 
the duties are paid by the country from which the goods are 
imported. That this is not the case is at once seen by the 
fact that an increase in duty means a rise in the price of an 
article in the country imposing the duty, and this to the actual 
consumer often amounts to more than the rise in the duty. 
In these cases consumers pay the duty themselves; and the 
customs revenues, so far from being a national asset, are merely 
another form of taxation paid by the people." And the masses 
in Japan, already staggering under the enormous burden of an 
average tax amounting to 32 per cent, of their earnings (on 
account of their wars with China and Russia and their enormous 
army and navy expenditure), are ill-prepared to stand further 



"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES 31 

taxation for the benefit of special interests. On the whole, 
there seems to have been much truth in what a recent authority 
said on this subject: 

" The Japanese manufacturers are concerned only to make monopoly profits 
out of the consumer. If they can do that, they will not worry about foreign 
markets, from which, in fact, their policy is bound more and more to exclude 
them." 

In any case, manufacturing in Japan is bound to increase, 
but it ought not to increase through unjust oppression of 
agriculture or at the expense of the physical stamina of the 
race. This fact is now winning recognition not only from the 
nation at large, but from public-spirited manufacturers as well. 

Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me 
Wednesday when influential friends secured special per- 
mission, not often granted to strangers, for me to visit the 
great Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning Company's plant near 
Tokyo — the great surprise being not that I succeeded in 
getting permission to visit this famous factory, though that was 
partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit. 

Much has been said and written as to the utterly deplorable 
condition of Japanese factory workers, and I was quite prepared 
for sights that would outrage my feelings of humanity. Imag- 
ine my surprise, therefore, when I found the manager making 
a hobby of "welfare work" for his operatives and with a sys- 
tem of such work modelled after the Krupp system in Germany, 
the best in the world! And as the Kanegafuchi Company 
has seventeen factories in all, representing several cities and 
aggregating over 300,000 spindles, being one of the most famous 
industries of Japan, it will be seen that its example is by no 
means without significance. 

The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500 
operatives, and they are cleaner, I should say, than most of 
our stores and offices. The same thing is true of their great 
hospital and boarding-house, and the dining-room is also sur- 



32 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

prisingly clean and well kept. Of the welfare work proper a 
whole article could be written. Each operative pays 3 per 
cent, of his or her wages (most operatives are women) into a 
common insurance and pension fund, and the company, out 
of its earnings, pays into the fund an equal amount. From 
this a pension is given the family of any employee who dies, 
while if an operative gets sick or is injured, a committee, as- 
sisted by Director Fuji, allows a suitable pension until recovery. 
In the case, however, of long-standing disease or disability, 
help is given, after ten years, from still another fund. This 
employees' pension fund now amounts to $143,000, while 
other funds given partly or wholly by the company include 
$30,000 for operatives' sanitary fund, $112,000 in a fund "for 
promoting operatives' welfare," and $15,000 for erecting an 
operatives' sanatorium. The company also has a savings 
department, paying 10 per cent, on long-time deposits made 
by employees. There is an excellent theatre and dance hall 
at the Tokyo plant, and I suppose at the other branches also, 
and five physicians are regularly employed to look after the 
health of operatives. 

While the hours of labor in Japan generally are inexcusably 
long and, as a rule, only two rest days a month are allowed, the 
Kanegafuchi Company observes the Biblical seventh-day rest 
with profitable results. The work hours are long yet, it is 
true, ten hours having been the rule up to October 1, and now 
nine and one half hours. The ten hours this summer embraced 
the time from 6 to 6, with a half hour's rest from 9 to 9:30, one 
hour from 11:30 to 12:30, and another half hour from 3 to 3:30: 
a system of halfway rests not common in America, I believe. 

Conditions at Kanegafuchi, of course, are not ideal, nor 
would I hold them up as a general model for American mills. 
Rather should America ask: "If Japan in a primitive stage of 
industrial evolution is doing so much, how much more ought 
we to do?" More noteworthy still is the fact that the senti- 
ment of the country is loudly and insistently demanding a law 



"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES 3S 

to stop the evils of child labor and night work for women, 
which, on the whole, are undoubtedly bad — very bad. 
The Kanegafuchi welfare work is exceptional, but it is in 
line with the new spirit of the people. 

That Japan with its factory system not yet extensive, its 
people used to a struggle for existence tenfold harder than ours, 
and with a population comprising only the wealthy or capitalist 
class — that under such conditions, these Buddhist Japanese 
should still make effective demand for adequate factory labor 
legislation is enough to put to shame many a Christian state 
in which our voters still permit conditions that reproach our 
boasted chivalry and humanity. Perhaps all the changes 
needed cannot be made at once without injury to manufactur- 
ing interests, but in that case the law should at least require a 
gradual and steady approach to model conditions — a distinct 
step forward each six months until at the end of three years, 
or five years at longest, every state should have a law as good 
as that of Massachusetts. 

Tokyo, Japan. 



DOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE 
WHITE MAN'S TRADE? 



WITH all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's 
doors and labor to be had for a mere song — four 
fifths of her cotton-factory workers, girls and 
women averaging 13| cents a day, and the male 
labor averaging only 22 cents — it is simply useless for Europe 
and America to attempt to compete with her in any line she 
chooses to monopolize. Now that she has recovered from her 
wars, she will doubtless forge to the front as dramatically as 
an industrial power as she has already done as a military and 
maritime power, while other nations, helpless in competition, 
must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion's share 
of Asiatic trade — the richest prize of twentieth-century 
commerce." 

In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English 
and American manufacturers have talked for several years. 
For the last few months, professing to see in Japan's adoption 
of a high protective tariff partial confirmation of their predic- 
tions, they have assumed added authority. Their arguments, 
too, are so plausible and the facts as to Japan's low wage scale 
so patent that the world has become acutely interested in the 
matter. I account myself especially fortunate, therefore, in 
having been able to spend several weeks under peculiarly favor- 
able circumstances in a first-hand study of Japanese industrial 

34 



JAPANESE COMPETITION 35 

conditions. I have been in great factories and business 
offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreign manufac- 
turers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had the 
views of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire 
as well as of the great captains of industry; I have talked 
with several men who have served in the Emperor's cabinet, 
including one who has stood next to the Mikado himself in 
power; and at the same time I have taken pains to get the views 
of English and American consular officials, commercial attaches 
and travelers, and of newspaper men both foreign and 
native. 

And yet after having seen the big factories and the little 
factory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened 
to the most ambitious of Japan's industrial leaders, I shall 
leave the country convinced of the folly of the talk that white 
labor cannot compete with Japanese labor. I believe indeed 
that the outlook is encouraging for manufacturing in the Mi- 
kado's empire, but I do not believe that this development is 
to be regarded as a menace to English or American industry. 
Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upon 
a radical misconception of conditions as they are. 

In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's 
rise as a military power and her predicted rise as an industrial 
power should be branded as the groundless non sequiiur that 
it is. "All our present has its roots in the past," as my first 
Japanese acquaintance said to me, and we ignore fundamental 
facts when we forget that for centuries unnumbered Japan 
existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for the blossom. The 
man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving, the end 
of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, the Sam- 
urai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce 
was despised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated 
as a necessary evil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and 
Mukden we have no modern Minerva springing full-armed 
from the head of Jove, but rather an unrecognized Ulysses 



36 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKENG UP 

of ancient skill surprising onlookers merely ignorant of the 
long record of his prowess. Viewed from the same historical 
standpoint, however, industrial Japan is a mere learner, 
unskilled, with the long and weary price of victory yet 
to pay. ^ 

In the race she has to run, moreover, the Mikado-land has 
no such advantages as many of our people have been led to 
believe. In America it has long been my conviction that cheap 
labor is never cheap; that so-called "cheap labor" is a curse to 
any community — not because it is cheap but because it is 
inefficient. The so-called cheap negro labor in the South, 
for example, I have come to. regard as perhaps the dearest on 
the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite prepared 
to find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of 
conditions in a primitive stage of industrial organization, I 
thought that I might find cheap labor with all the advantages, 
in so far as there are any, and few of the disadvantages, encoun- 
tered elsewhere. But it is not so. An American factory owner 
in Osaka, summing up his Job's trials with raw Japanese labor, 
used exactly my own phrase in a newspaper article a few days 
ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap." And all my investiga- 
tions have convinced me that the remark is as applicable in 
Japan as it is in America or England. 

The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course, 
amazingly low. The latest 1910 statistics, as furnished by 
the Department of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American 
money) of 40 cents for carpenters, Slj cents for shoemakers, 
34 cents for blacksmiths, 25| cents for compositors, 19| cents 
for male farm laborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12 
cents for female. In the cotton factories I visited, those of 
the better sort, the wages run from 5 cents a day for the young- 
est children to 25 cents a day for good women workers. In 
a mousselaine mill I was told that the average wages were 
22| cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50 cents for 
the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was 



JAPANESE COMPETITION 37 

for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher grade 
of efficiency than the average. 

But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well 
known to him, it was my host in the first Japanese house to 
which I was invited — one of the Emperor's privy councillors, 
and a man of much travel and culture who had studied commer- 
cial conditions at home and abroad rather profoundly — who 
expressed the conclusion that Japanese factory labor when 
reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly cheaper than 
European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite in 
view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old 
handicrafts and family industries to which our people have 
been accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world, 
but the moment we turn to modern industrial machinery on a 
large scale the newness of our endeavor tells against us in a 
hundred hindering ways. Numbers of times I have sought to 
work out some industrial policy which had succeeded, and 
could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or America, 
only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered 
elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of 
industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with 
a record for continuous government unsurpassed by any Euro- 
pean country, our political and military achievements are but 
the fruitage of our long history, but in industry we must simply 
wait through patient generations to reach the stage repre- 
sented by the Englishman, Irishman, or German, who takes to 
machinery as if by instinct." 

All my investigations since have confirmed the philosophy 
of this distinguished Japanese whose name, if I should mention 
it, would be familiar to many in America and England. In the 
Tokyo branch of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company (a com- 
pany which controls 300,000 spindles) the director, speaking 
from the experience of one of the greatest and best conducted 
industries in Japan, declared: "Your skilled factory laborers 
in America or England will work four sides of a ring frame; 



38 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

our unskilled laborer may work only one." A young English- 
man in another factory declared: "It takes five men here to 
do work that I and my mate would take care of at home." 
An American vice-consul told me that it takes three or four 
times as much Japanese as foreign labor to look after an equal 
number of looms. A Japanese expert just back from Europe 
declared recently that "Lancashire labor is more expensive 
than ours, but really cheaper." Similarly the Tokyo corre- 
spondent of the London Times, summing up an eight-column 
review of Japanese industry, observed: "If we go to the bottom 
of the question and consider what is being paid as wages and 
what is being obtained as the product of labor in Japan, we may 
find that Japanese labor is not cheaper than in other countries." 

II 

My own convinction is that in actual output the Japanese 
labor is somewhat cheaper than American or European labor, 
but not greatly so, and that even this margin of excess in com- 
parative cheapness represents mainly a blood-tax on the lives 
and energies of the Japanese people, the result of having no 
legislation to restrain the ruinous overwork of women and 
little children — a grievous debt which the nation must pay 
at the expense of its own stamina and which the manufacturers 
must also pay in part through the failure to develop experi- 
enced and able-bodied laborers. The latest "Japan Year 
Book" expresses the view that "in per capita output two or 
three skilled Japanese workers correspond to one foreign," 
but under present conditions the difficulty here is to find the 
skilled workers at all. When Mr. Oka, of the Department of 
Commerce and Agriculture, told me that the average Japanese 
factory hand remains in the business less than two years, I 
was astonished, but inquiry from original sources confirmed the 
view. With the best system of welfare work in the empire, 
the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half 



JAPANESE COMPETITION 39 

to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employ- 
ing 2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at 
work as long as three years. Under such conditions, the 
majority of the operatives at any time must be in a stage of de- 
plorable inexperience, and it is no wonder that the "Year Book" 
just quoted goes on to confess that "one serious defect of the 
production is lack of uniformity in quality — attributed to 
unskilled labor and overwork of machinery." 

The explanation of this situation, of course, is largely to be 
found in the fact that Japanese industries are women's indus- 
tries — there being seven times as large a proportion of women 
to men, the Department of Commerce informs me, as in Eu- 
ropean and American manufacturing. These women workers 
are mostly from the country. Their purpose is only to work 
two or three years before getting married, and thousands of 
them, called home to marry the husbands their parents have 
selected, or else giving way physically under strain, quit work 
before their contracts expire. "We have almost no factory 
laborers who look on the work as a life business," was an 
expression often repeated to me. 

Not only in the mills, but in numerous other lines of work, 
have I seen illustrations of the primitive stage of Japan's indus- 
trial efficiency. As a concrete illustration I wish I might pass 
to each reader the box of Kobe-made matches on the table 
before me (for match-making of this sort is an important 
industry here, as well as the sort conducted through matri- 
monial middlemen without waiting for the aid or consent of 
either of the parties involved). I have never in my life seen 
such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxes at 
home would you find so many splinters without heads, so many 
defective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves, 
I am told that it takes five or six hands to equal the product 
of one skilled foreign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese 
servants to do the work of one white servant" is the general 
verdict of housekeepers, while it has also been brought to my 



40 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAEING UP 

attention that in shops two or three clerks are required to do 
the work of one at home. A Japanese newspaper man (his 
paper is printed in English) tells me that linotype compositors 
set only half as many ems per hour as in America. In short, 
the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what 
I have written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of 
Japanese cheap labor, the captain of the steamer on which 
I came from America, rather spoiled his enthusiasm for getting 
his ship coaled at Nagasaki for 7| cents a ton, by acknowledg- 
ing that if it rained he should have to keep his ship waiting a 
day to get sufficient hands. 

Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced 
into longer hours than labor anywhere else — eleven hours at 
night this week, eleven hours in the day next week — I am con- 
vinced that the people as a whole are more than ordinarily 
averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted toil. "We have a streak 
of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor said to me, "and 
we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people are not 
workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried." 
Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese 
artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, 
and the people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and 
carefulness into the new environment of European machinery. 
"Take the Tokyo street cars," said an ex-cabinet officer to me; 
" the wheels are seldom or never cleaned or oiled, and are haK 
eaten by rust." The railroads are but poorly kept up; the tele- 
phones exhaust your patience; while in the case of telegraphing, 
your exasperation is likely to lose itself in amazed amusement. 
A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram from Osaka to 
Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow train to 
start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of my 
message before it did. 

In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth a 
satisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said, 
and that is that we should not put the blame wholly on the 



JAPANESE COMPETITION 41 

wage-earner. Not a small proportion of the responsibility- 
lies at the door of inexpert managers. The family system of 
production has not only been the rule for generations with 
that minority of the people not engaged in farming, but it is 
still the dominant type of Japanese industry, and it will take 
time even to provide opportunities for training a sufficient 
corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production. 

In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is 
not proving so abnormally profitable, I may question whether 
Japanese factories have paid as good dividends, in proportion 
to prevailing rates of interest on money, as factories in England 
and America. Baron Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese finan- 
ciers and one of the pioneers in cotton manufacturing, is my 
authority for the statement that 12 per cent, would be a rather 
high estimate of the average rate of dividend, while figures 
furnished by the Department of Finance show that for ten 
years the average rate of interest on loans has been 11.25 per 
cent. 

The fact that Western ideas as to Japan's recent industrial 
advance have been greatly exaggerated may also be demon- 
strated just here. While the latest government figures show 
that in twelve years the number of female factory operatives 
increased from 261,218 to 400,925 and male factory operatives 
from 173,614 to 248,251, it is plain that a manufacturing popu- 
lation of 649,000 in a country of 50,000,000 souls is small, and 
the actual progress has not been so great as the relative figures 
would indicate. Moreover, many so-called "factories" employ 
less than ten persons and would not be called factories at all 
in England or America. The absence of iron deposits is a 
great handicap, the one steel foundry being operated by the 
government at a heavy loss, and in cotton manufacturing, where 
"cheap labor" is supposed to be most advantageous, no 
very remarkable advance has been made in the last decade. 
From 1899 to 1909 English manufacturers so increased their 
trade that in the latter year they imported $222 worth of raw 



42 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

cotton for every $100 worth imported ten years before, while 
Japan in 1909 imported only $177 worth for each $100 worth 
a decade previous — though of course she made this cotton 
into higher grade products. 

Ill 

It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in Japan 
are steadily increasing and will continue to increase. More 
significant than the fact of the low cost per day, to which I have 
already given attention, is the fact that these wages represent 
an average increase per trade of 40 per cent, above the wages 
eight years previous. The new 1910 "Financial and Economic 
Annual" shows the rate of wages of forty-six classes of labor 
for a period of eight years. For not one line of labor is a de- 
crease of wages shown, and for only two an increase of less 
than 30 per cent.; sixteen show increases between 30 and 40 
per cent., seventeen between 40 and 50 per cent,, eight 
from 50 to 60 per cent., three from 60 to 70 per cent., whUe 
significantly enough the greatest increase, 81 per cent., is for 
female servants, a fact largely due to factory competition. In 
Osaka the British vice-consul gave me the figures for the 
latest three-year period for which figures have been published, 
indicating in these thirty-six months a 30 per cent, gain in the 
wages of men in the factories and a 25 per cent, gain in the 
wages of women. 

Of no small significance in any study of Japanese industry 
must also be the fact that there are in Japan proper a full half 
million fewer women than men (1910 figures: men, 25,639,581; 
women, 25,112,338) — a condition the reverse of that obtaining 
in almost every other country. Now the young Japanese 
are a very home-loving folk, and even if they were not, almost 
all Shinto parents, realizing the paramount importance of hav- 
ing descendants to worship their spirits, favor and arrange early 
marriages for their sons. And what with this competition for 



JAPANESE COMPETITION 43 

wives, the undiminished demand for female servants, and a 
half million fewer women than men to draw from, the outlook 
for any great expansion of manufacturing based on woman 
labor is not very bright. Moreover, with Mrs. Housekeeper 
increasing her frantic bids for servants 81 per cent, in eight 
years, and still mourning that they are not to be had, it is 
plain that the manufacturer has serious competition from this 
quarter, to say nothing of the further fact that the Japanese 
girls are for the first time becoming well educated and are 
therefore likely to be in steadily increasing demand as office- 
workers. Upon this general subject the head of one of Osaka's 
leading factories said to me: "I am now employing 2500women, 
but if I wished to enlarge my mill at once and employ 5000, 
it would be impossible for me to get the labor, though I might 
increase to this figure by adding a few hundred each year for 
several years." 

Unquestionably, too, shorter hours, less night work, weekly 
holidays, and better sanitary conditions must be adopted by 
most manufacturers if they are to continue to get labor. The 
Kobe Chronicle quotes Mr. Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, 
as saying that "most of the women workers are compelled 
to leave the factories on account of their constitutions being 
wrecked " after two or three years of night work, consumption 
numbering its victims among them by the thousands. Either 
the mills must give better food and lodging than they now 
provide or else they must pay higher wages directly which will 
enable the laborers to make better provision for themselves. 

Yet another reason why wages must continue to advance is 
the steady increase in cost of living, due partly to the higher 
standard developed through education and contact with 
Western civilization, but perhaps even more largely to the 
fearful burden of taxation under which the people are stagger- 
ing. A usual estimate of the tax rate is 30 per cent, of one's 
income, while Mr. Wakatsuki, late Japanese Financial Com- 
missioner to London, is quoted as authority for the statement 



44 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAE3NG UP 

that the people now pay in direct and indirect taxes, 35 per 
cent, of their incomes. And I doubt whether even this esti- 
mate includes the increased amounts that citizens are forced to 
pay for salt and tobacco as a result of the government mon- 
opoly in these products, or the greatly increased prices of sugar 
resulting from the government's paternalistic eflForts to guar- 
antee prosperity to sugar manufacturers in Formosa. 

IV 

Higher still, and higher fpi' than anything the nation has 
ever yet known, must go the cost of living under the new 
tariff law. From a British textile representative I learned the 
other day that a grade of English woollens largely used by the 
Japanese for underwear will cost over one third more under 
the new tariff, while the increased duty on certain other lines 
of goods is indicated by the table herewith: 

PERCENTAGE OF DUTY TO COST OF ARTICLE 

Old Tariff New Tariff 

Printed goods 3 22 

White lawns 10 47 

Shirtings 10 39 

Cotton Italians 8 35 

Poplins 8 19 

Brocades 10 22 

Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its boot- 
straps. The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire 
seem to me to realize even now that through the new tariff 
Japanese industry, as a whole, is likely to lose much more by 
lessened ability to compete in foreign markets than it will 
gain by shackled competition in the home markets. Far- 
seeing old Count Okuma, once Premier, and one of the empire's 
Elder Statesmen, seemed to realize this more fully than any 
other man I have seen. "Within two or three years from the 
time the new law goes into force," he declared, "I am confi- 



JAPANESE COMPETITION 46 

dent that its injurious effects will be so apparent that the 
people will force its repeal. With our heavy taxes the margin 
of wages left for comfort is already small, and with the cost 
of living further increased by the new tariff, wages must inevi- 
tably advance. This will increase the cost of our manufac- 
tured products, now exported mostly to China, India, and 
other countries requiring cheap or low-grade goods, and where 
we must face the competition of the foremost industrial nations 
of the world. As our cost of production increases, our compe- 
tition with Europe will become steadily more difficult and a 
decrease in our exports will surely follow. It is folly for one 
small island to try to produce everything it needs. The tariff 
on iron, for example, can only hamper every new industry 
by increasing the cost of machinery, and must especially hinder 
navigation and shipbuilding, in which we have made such 
progress." Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular 
dailies are as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the 
Kobe Chronicle declares that, with diminished exports to 
Japan, "British manufacturers will find compensation in the 
lessened ability of the Japanese to compete in China; and 
Japan will find that she has raised prices against herself and 
damaged her own efficiency." 

That such will be the net result of Japan's new policy seems 
to me to admit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special 
lines of British and American manufacture may suffer, but, 
on the whole, what the white man's trade loses in Japan will 
be recompensed for in China and India. Even after Japan's 
adoption of the moderately protective tariff of 1899 her export 
of yarns to China — in the much discussed "market right at 
her doors " — dropped from a product of 340,000 bales to a 
recent average of 250,000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according 
to the latest published government figures, the number of 
employees in Japanese cotton factories increased only 240 — 
one third of 1 per cent. — or from 73,985 to 74,225, to be exact, 
while I have already alluded to the figures showing the compara- 



46 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

tive English and Japanese imports of raw cotton from 1890 to 
1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Japan 
in this period going from $30,000,000 to $54,000,000, or 77 
per cent,, while England's advance was from $135,000,000 to 
$300,000,000, or 122 per cent. The increase in England's 
case, of course, was largely, and in Japan's case almost wholly, 
due to the increased price of the cotton itself, but the figures 
are none the less useful for the purposes of comparison. 

In the frequent attempts of the Japanese Government to 
stimulate special industries by subsidies and special privileges 
there is, it seems to me, equally as httle danger to the trade of 
Europe and America in general (though here, too, special 
industries may suffer now and then), because Japan is in this 
way simply handicapping herself for effective industrial growth. 
Just at this writing we have an illustration in the case of the 
Formosan sugar subsidy which seems to have developed into 
a veritable Frankenstein; or, to use a homelier figure, the gov- 
ernment seems to be in the position of the man who had the 
bear by the tail, with equal danger in holding on or letting go. 
Already, as a result of the system of subsidies, bounties and 
special privileges, individual initiative has been discouraged, 
a dangerous and corrupting alliance of government with busi- 
ness developed, public morals debased (as was strikingly brought 
out in the Dai Nippon sugar scandal), and the people, as Mr. 
Sasano, of the Foreign Department, complains, now "rely on 
the help of the government on all occasions." On the same 
point the Tokyo Keizai declares that "the habit of looking to 
the government for assistance in all and everything, oblivious 
of independent enterprise . . . has now grown to the 
chronic stage, and unless it is cured the health and vitality of 
the nation will ultimately be sapped and undermined." 

As for increasing complaints of "low commercial morality" 
brought against Japanese merchants, that is not a matter of 
concern in this discussion, except in so far as it may prove a 
form of Japanese commercial suicide. But to one who holds 



JAPANESE COMPETITION 47 

the view, as I do, that the community of nations is enriched 
by every worthy industrial and moral advance on the part of 
any nation, it is gratifying to find the general alarm over the 
present undoubtedly serious conditions, and it is to be hoped 
that the efforts of the authorities will result in an early change 
to better methods. 



Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day 
Japanese industry, and in no point do I find any material 
menace to the general well-being of American and European 
trade. It is my opinion that the Japanese will steadily develop 
industrial efficiency, but that in the future no more than in 
the present will Japan menace European and American indus- 
try (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantages in 
Manchuria, Korea, etc.), for just in proportion as efficiency 
increases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking, 
wages and standards of living will advance. The three — 
efficiency, wages, cost of living — seem destined to go hand in 
hand, and this has certainly been the experience thus far. 
And whatever loss we may suffer by reason of Japan gradually 
supplanting us in certain cruder forms of production should 
be abundantly compensated for in the better market for our 
own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people 
of increasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living. 

In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little 
reason to fear any disastrous competition from Japan. Perhaps 
she has been allowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria 
or elsewhere, but that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another 
story. 

Kobe, Japan. 



VI 



BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM, AND CHRISTIANITY 
IN JAPAN 

ONE of the most fascinating places in all Japan is 
Kyoto, the old capital of the empire, and one of 
its most picturesque and historic cities. Without 
great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without 
the political importance of Tokyo, and without shipping 
advantages such as have made Kobe and Yokahoma famous, 
Kyoto is noted rather for conserving the life of old Japan. 
Here are the family industries, the handicrafts, and a hundred 
little arts in which the Land of the Rising Sun excels. 

Little themselves in stature, the people of Japan are best 
in dealing with little things requiring daintiness, finish, and 
artistic taste. Some one has said that their art is "great in 
little things and little in great things," and unlike many 
epigrams, it is as true as it is terse. 

A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or 
"stores," as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, 
lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or 
another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic 
or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and house- 
hold articles which in America would be raw and plain in their 
obvious practicality. The room in which I write is a fine 
illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods, 
entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain 
touches and bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. 
Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose 

48 



BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 49 

books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accu- 
rate, are nevertheless too valuable to be neglected by any 
student of Japan: 

"It ha3 been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ 
every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design 
an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger 
way, of all things in a Japanese home; even such articles of common use as 
a bronze candlestick, a brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo 
curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fit- 
ness entirely xmknown to Western cheap production." 

Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, 
Buddhist and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just 
here the difference between these two faiths that were long 
merged into one, but have been dissociated since the restora- 
tion of the Emperor to his old-time powers forty years ago. 
Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of ancestor-worship, 
with its doctrine of the divine descent of the Mikado from the 
Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful adherent 
make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's ancestors. 
With the future life or with moral precepts for this life it 
does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your 
own instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as 
it may be caUed a religion at all: the tendency is to consider 
it only a form of patriotism and not a religion. 

Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of 
theology comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting 
upon much ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it 
may have to do with practical morals. "The fact is, we Jap- 
anese have never gotten our morals from our religion," said 
one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me in Tokyo. "What 
moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor Bud- 
dhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics." 

Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted 
religious theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly de- 



50 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKLNG UP 

generated into a shameless mockery of its former self. To 
read Sir Edwin Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism 
in his "Light of Asia," and then see practical Buddhism in 
Japan with all its superstitions and idolatries, is very much 
like hearing bewitched Titania's praise of her lover's beauty 
and then turning to see the long ears and hairy features of 
the ass that he has become. 

Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold him- 
self coming to Buddhist Japan dropped Into open and flagrant 
immoralities such as a Christian community would never 
have tolerated, while the foremost American-bred apologists 
for Buddhism here have been but little better. One of the 
greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more notorious 
right now for the vices of its sacred (.'') officials than for any vir- 
tues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the Emperor 
himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some 
Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least 
an outward reformation of their organization, but the dif- 
ficulties are such as to make the success of the undertaking 
very improbable. With the usual Japanese quality of imi- 
tativeness they have started "Young Men's Buddhist Asso- 
ciations," "Sunday schools,'* etc., and are also beginning to 
follow the example set by the Christians of participating in 
philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service 
I attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a 
raised altar in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged 
about him, and the general service, as usual, was much as if 
they had copied the Catholic ritual. 

After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian ser- 
vice at the Congregational School, or Doshisha, where the 
sound of the American-born minister's voice was punctuated 
by the street sounds of whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy 
getas of passing Buddhists, while outside the window I could 
see the bamboo trees and the now familar red disk and white 
border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was offered for "the 



BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 51 

President of the United States, the King of Great Britain, 
the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan." 

At night I was even more interested, even though I could 
not understand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended 
for half an hour. Although there was a downpour of rain 
the chapel was comfortably filled and the faces of the wor- 
shippers, I thought, were of more than ordinary intelligence and 
promise, while their sincerity is illustrated by the fact that 
numbers of the women Christians are actually depriving them- 
selves of suitable food in order to give money for erecting a 
larger church building. 

The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in 
his home one of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and 
common throughout the empire forty odd years ago, pro- 
hibiting Christianity, the ancient penalty being nothing less 
than death itself. The explanation of this notice is found in 
a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago the Cath- 
olics came here, started missions, and made many converts 
among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also 
to become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the 
first English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were 
from 600,000 to 1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, 
away over here in Japan. Seven years later, however, govern- 
ment persecution began, Christianity was put under the ban, 
and so remained until eight years after our Civil War ended. 
Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in this 
long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly 
handed their faith down from father to son through all the 
long generations until tolerance came again. 

Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 
an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came 
to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, dis- 
covered for the first time that a man might be a Christian with- 
out being punished, and then confessed that each day he 
had worshipped secretly at a little Catholic shrine hidden in 



52 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

his wall, as his father and his father's father had done before 
him. 

As another illustration of the changed attitude toward 
Christianity, I may mention that a Japanese Buddhist once 
came to Doctor Hail's services armed with a dagger to kill 
the preacher, but had his attention caught by the sermon 
while waiting his chance and is now a missionary himself! 

Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a 
greater change than in the general estimate of woman, although 
this is an objection the natives openly urge against Christianity. 
Just as in any conflict of interest the family in Japan has been 
everything and the individual nothing, so in every disagree- 
ment between husband and wife his opinions count for every- 
thing, hers for nothing. The orthodox and traditional Jap- 
anese view as to a woman's place has been very accurately 
and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanese 
moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman": 

"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her 
husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear and 
trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and forwardness. A 
woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself and never 
weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband, and thus escape celestial 
castigation." 

Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is 
declared: 

"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, dis- 
content, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five maladies infest seven or 
eight out of every ten women, and it is from these that arises the inferiority 
of women to men." 

The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one 
or two amusing incidents — amusing in one aspect and pa- 
thetic in another — that are of interest in this connection. 
A Japanese member of her church declared: "No, no, Mrs. 




THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA 
J This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the statue's 
feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene contemplation for which the 
Buddhist religion stands; is indeed, hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy 
Nirvana which it teaches is the goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer 
piece of statuary in the East than this 




THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK 
The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men 
together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground, 
and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful of earth! 



BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 55 

Hail, you can't ever make me believe that my wife is as good 
as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching a Sunday- 
school class concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: 
"Why did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And 
the Japanese answer was: "Because he was going to talk on 
intellectual things and she needed some man to help her 
understand ! " 

Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells 
of tying his wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only 
to find the Japanese amazed that a man should so humble 
himself. His wife's taking his arm in walking was also re- 
garded as the height of impropriety! 

No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity 
of woman, probably because no religion has ever recognized 
the worth of the individual. Just as I have said, that in the 
old days, and almost as largely to-day, in the relations of the 
home, it was the family that counted and not the individual, 
so in his relations to the larger world beyond the individual 
formerly counted for nothing when weighed against the wishes 
of the superior classes. In the earliest days, when the lord 
died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait 
upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object 
in view, wives and servants committed suicide on the death 
of the master. Even now it is regarded as honorable for a 
girl to sell herself into shame to save the family from want. 

The same antipodal difference between East and West — 
here "the family is tlie social unit" and with us the individual 
himself — explains the system of adoption : a younger son not 
being essential to the maintenance of the family cult may be 
adopted into another family, while the eldest son may not. 
On the same principle the father rules, not because of what he 
represents as an Individual, but because he represents the 
Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must then 
join his other children in obeying the eldest son. 

In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of individ- 



56 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

ual rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for 
centuries the smallest details of everyday life were regulated 
by law, but more seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged 
class, might "cut down in cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or 
a farmer on the slightest provocation, or simply for the purpose 
of testing his sword," while in case of the ruin of their cause 
it was the honorable and natural thing for soldiers to commit 
"hari-kiri" — that is to say, commit suicide by disemboweling 
themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that "the 
value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christian 
spirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned 
as an example that formerly suicide, in such circumstances 
as I have mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now 
it is regarded as a sin." 

Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influ- 
ences the peoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers 
behave like fatalists because the fundamental basis of the 
social order for centuries has been the necessity of the Individ- 
ual to sacrifice pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required 
either by the Family or by the Social Order. And this 
partially explains why it is said in sober earnest that the 
highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboys to-day is to 
die for their Emperor. ^^^^^ 

This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will 
be from Korea — if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been 
raging in Osaka and in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought 
it necessary to visit in order to get first-hand information about 
industrial conditions. Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives 
only a few hours. The first day's record here in Kobe, I 
believe, showed six cases and five deaths. Gradually, however, 
cholera is being stamped out, just as we have eradicated yel- 
low fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall event- 
ually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any 
town as a disgrace — an evidence of primitive and uncivilized 



BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 57 

sanitary conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka 
in 1879 tells me that there were 10,000 cholera victims in that 
one city that year — the yellow flag on almost every street, 
and all through the night the sound of men hurrying past 
with new victims for the hospitals or with new corpses for the 
burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than 313,000 
Japanese died of the scourge. 

I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously 
interesting country. For just as America represents the 
ultimate type of Occidental civilization, so does Japan rep- 
resent the ultimate type of Oriental civilization. 

More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and 
Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human 
history. For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced 
across the plains and peaks of Asia, finding at last in these 
outlying islands his farthermost outpost, and so tarried here 
in the Farthest East, "the Land of the Rising Sun." He 
hardly thought of the existence of a West, but if his Buddha- 
like composure had been ruffled by such a thought, he might 
have droned monotonously: 

" Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." 

But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily east- 
ward, the white man, starting from the land of the Euphrates, 
had pitched his camp, with each succeeding generation, nearer 
and nearer the setting sun. Greece — Rome — Spain — 
France — England — then four hundred years ago, more rest- 
less than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that 
hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. West- 
ward still the course of empire then continued until in our time 
the white man planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast. 

There was no more West. 

Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct 
deeper than reason, the white man sent his messengers across 
the new-found ocean and awakened the Sleepy World 



58 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

of the Yellow Man by the booming of Perry's guns off 
Yokahoma. 

The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with 
observation, and the deeper meaning of the greatest events 
in human history may often escape the attention of contem- 
poraries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and 
thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked not merely 
a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of 
human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how 
the strange world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a 
stage-setting in keeping with its dramatic significance. Not 
to England, nor to any other great naval and commercial 
Power of the time, but to the young United States — the 
nation that had found the ultimate West — came the un- 
likely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East 
to Western trade and thought. 

When at last the world has grown old and nations and 
empires not yet formed shall themselves have gone the mortal 
way common alike to human creatures and human creations, 
I think the far historian will record few events either more 
dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of meaning than 
Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five years after 
the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old 
drama of our westward march. 

So to-day, as I have said, the fuU tides of Orient and 
Occident have rushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a 
land of curious customs and strange phenomena, but a land 
in which the contrasts exist side by side, and most interesting of 
all, a land of strangely mingling social and industrial currents. 
East and West have met, and we wait to see what forces 
in each shall prevail when the shock of their fierce encounter 
shall have passed. For it is not merely Japan, but all Asia, 
whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new, tense 
struggle here between the ideals of West and East. 

As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the Japanese 



BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM AND CHRISTIANITY 59 

in European dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams 
of men in coats and trousers and shoes mingle with men wear- 
ing kimonas, hikamas, and getas, so in the minds of the people 
the teachings of modern science and Confucian classic meet; 
the faith of the Christian grapples with the faith of the Bud- 
dhist; the masterful aspirations of Western civilization surge 
against the old placidity of the East. 

What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems 
to me, depends so much as upon the religious foundation 
upon which Japan seeks to build the structure of her newer 
and richer life. Many of her people, if I may change the 
figure, are seeking to put the new wine of Christian civili- 
zation into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist ritualism. 
That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others, 
like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep 
away all religion, but they will find that they are fighting against 
an ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving 
of the divine in man. 

In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to con- 
vince me of the truth of both the foregoing observations. I 
confess that I came to the country with a distinct doubt as 
to the wisdom of stressing mission work here — came think- 
ing the field less promising then elsewhere. But I go away 
with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has dis- 
pelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a 
student of social and industrial conditions, I believe that 
to-day Japan needs nothing more than Christian missionaries 
— men who are willing to forget dogma and tradition and 
creedal differences in emphasizing the fundamental teachings 
of Christ Himself, and who have education, sympathy, and 
vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping mold a 
new and composite type of human civilization, a type which 
may ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of 
our human race. 

Kobe, Japan. 



VII 

KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 

HAVE become a contemporary of David and the patri- 
archs of Israel. In the civiHzation into which I have 
come science and invention are in swaddhng clothes, the 
Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of Western 
Europe still in the womb of Time. 

This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan, 
I am travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning 
Calm" — or " Chosen," as the Japanese will call it hereafter 
— whose authentic recorded history runs back into the 
twelfth century before the Christian era, and whose general 
features must have changed but little in all this time. A 
typical Korean view of the present year might well be pho- 
tographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old 
Testament. 

The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks har- 
nessed in the primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their 
plow stocks are of wood rough-hewn from their native forest 
trees, the plowman here never standing between the "plow- 
handles," as we say, because there is only one handle and that 
little better than a stick of firewood. With sickles equally 
pr'aiitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the fields; 
with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly high 
enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock 
walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or 
on which immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the 
autumn sun. Nor would the dress of the people — every- 

60 



KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 61 

body in white (or what was once white) garments — have 
seemed strange in ancient Judea. 

There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible 
pictures of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, 
as October's hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint 
light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts, 
and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has 
seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by 
such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive. Rather, 
in looking out over the picturesque mountains and valleys 
and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the wild" in 
your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone 
nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are 
moved to take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony 
and pitch your camp out under the great stars — larger and 
brighter indeed do they seem to burn here in the Orient — 
and feel the dew on your face as you awaken in the "morning 
calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life was 
snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few 
short months ago. 

As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less 
fascinating than the country through which I had travelled 
during the day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any elec- 
tric glare, strangely robed, almost spirit-like white figures 
were gliding here and there in the moonlight, singly or in 
groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our rickshaws brought 
us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead era is it, 
relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of massive 
stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail 
from Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar. 

In Japan I found a different world from that which I had 
known, but a world in which East and West were strangely 
mingled: much of the famihar with the unfamiUar. Here in 
Korea, on the contrary, I have found the real East, the Asia 
of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by 



62 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Western influences — dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet 
with a fascination all its own. Great bare mountains look 
down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their 
steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent 
valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little 
higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a tower- 
ing skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little 
two-story studio building on the main street of the city. Prac- 
tically every other building is but little higher and not greatly 
larger as a rule, than the pens in which our American farmers 
fatten hogs in the fall. Most American merchants would 
expect to make more in a day than the average white-robed, 
easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he smokes his 
long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world 
and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course, 
although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital 
of a kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city 
their home; no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few 
horses. There are miserable little overloaded ponies that the 
average farmer would feel that he could pitch single-handed 
into his barn-loft, but the burden-carriers are mostly bulls 
that are really magnificent in appearance, both oxen and ponies 
carrying loads on their backs that an American would expect 
to crush them. 

The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw 
hats as a badge of mourning, but the usual style of head-dress 
is to shave the extreme summit of the head, while the rest of 
the hair grows long and is braided up in a sort of topknot 
with a little bird-cage hat above it. This hat is then tied under 
the chin as an American woman would tie hers. 

Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them 
to stay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when 
on the street are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown 
over their heads and shoulders that leaves only their eyes and 
contiguous facial territory exposed. The tourist is at first 



KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 63 

inclined to think that there are many young girls on the streets, 
but this is because the boys dress as we have grown used to 
seeing girls dress in America. Take the young boy who waits 
on my table: fair of feature in his neat white dress, and with 
a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back, you would 
think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married 
a little later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave 
his head (not necessarily as a sign of mourning !) and wear his 
hair thereafter in the manner described in the preceding para- 
graph. An English missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here 
yesterday (and how pretty an English or American girl does 
look in this far land !) told me that a Korean girl of twenty or 
twenty-one is regarded as a rather desperate old maid, and 
the go-betweens, who arrange the mamages here as they do 
in Japan, are likely to charge a rather steep sum for getting a 
husband for one so far advanced in spinsterhood ! The chances 
are that the groom doesn't see his bride until the ceremony, 
and she doesn't even see him then, for according to the curious 
custom here the bride's eyes are sealed up until late after- 
noon of her wedding day. More than this, custom requires 
that the bride must keep absolutely unbroken silence all the 
day long, and for a varying length of time thereafter. Mrs. 
Bishop in her book on Korea asserts that "it may be a week 
or several months before the husband knows the sound of his 
wife's voice," — and the nature of the dear creatures in Amer- 
ica will of course insure the ready acceptance of her statement ! 
The go-betweens are often not very scrupulous, and for 
good fees sometimes manage to palm off damsels of unsatis- 
factory features on unsuspecting swains, or match undesir- 
able young fellows with girls vastly superior to them. A 
rather amusing instance was reported to me by the young lady 
from whom I have just quoted. One of the officials or noble- 
men in Seoul had a daughter whom the go-between was pre- 
paring to marry off into a family of rank in another city. A 
few days before the wedding-day-set-to-be, some one came to 



64 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

the father of the bride and said: "Did you know that your 
prospective son-in-law has a hare-lip?" Now a hare-lip in 
Korea is not merely such an undesirable addition to one's 
countenance as to make a Mrs. Wiggs happy because of being 
without it, but under the old dispensation no one with a hare- 
lip, or other like facial blemish, could be presented at court 
and thereby introduced into the Four Hundred of this capital 
city. Therefore the father waxed though tf id from his top- 
knot to the end of his long-stem pipe. "I tell you what I'll 
do," he finally said to his wife. "We'll go ahead with the 
ceremony, but instead of my daughter I'll substitute my orphan 
niece." And he did, and the young fellow didn't know any 
better for a week. 

Fortunately, however, my story doesn't end here. I am 
extremely glad to add the usual "lived-happily-ever-after" 
peroration, for that was really what happened in this case. 
The father of my young lady informant, who is a doctor, sewed 
up the young fellow's hp, he was presented at court, and the 
real daughter who so narrowly escaped marrying may be an 
old maid, for all I know. 

In such a high, dry climate as this one would expect to find 
little tuberculosis, but I am told that there is really a great 
deal of it, due to the carelessness of the families where there 
are victims, and to the generally unsanitary conditions. A 
daughter of one of the Southern missionaries here, having 
contracted the malady, has just gone to Arizona in search of 
cure. Everywhere on the streets I encounter faces marked by 
smallpox, and formerly to have had the disease was the rule 
rather than the exception. In fact, instead of alluding to a 
man's inexperience by saying "He hasn't cut his eye teeth," 
as we do, a Korean would say: "He hasn't had smallpox." 
Since vaccination became the rule, however, there are very 
few cases. 

Infant mortality here, as in America, is one of the greatest 
factors in the high death-rate, but conditions are improving. 



KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 65 

And so long as authorities declare that in America half the 
infant death-rate is due to ignorance or neglect, we haven't 
much right to point a scornful finger at Korea, anyhow. 

I have already alluded to the fact that the old monarchial 
government of Korea ended its inglorious career but a few 
short months ago. While the records of the nation run back 
more than three thousand years — probably to a period when 
Job was so superbly reproaching his comforters in the Land of 
Uz — the late dynasty runs back only 500 years. We Ameri- 
cans, I may say in passing, are accustomed to think of men of 
five hundred years ago, or even of John Smith and Pocahontas, 
as very ancient, but a pedigree of only five hundred years 
wouldn't entitle a family to enter good society over here. But 
though only five hundred years in power, this recent dynasty 
succeeded in doing about as much devilment and as little good 
as many dynasties much older in years. One of the mission- 
aries explained to me yesterday that it was only when the King 
got very mad that he would order heads cut off without reason 
— but then the Koreans are very lazy and his inactivity at 
other periods may have been due to sloth. 

The truth is, that most of these Oriental monarchies have 
been corrupt beyond the belief of the average American. 
When I was a boy I used to hear the old men in country churches 
thank God for the blessings of orderly government and for the 
privilege of worshipping as they chose, "with no one to molest 
us or make us afraid." As a rule, we take such things as 
matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia 
and into countries where the people have been cursed by cor- 
rupt governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon 
the mere whim of the government, where property has been 
confiscated with no better reason, and where men have had to 
die for their faiths : — when he, in short, comes into lands 
where the rights of neither life, property nor conscience have 
been respected, he is likely to prize his American privileges 
somewhat more highly. 



66 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

The old Korean dynasty was not only corrupt, but unspeak- 
ably stupid. Like the people, the King relied on sorcerers 
or fortune-tellers to find a lucky day or a lucky time of the 
moon to do whatever he wished, and in case of sickness con- 
sulted the midang, or conjurer, instead of a doctor. Thus 
when the prince had smallpox some years ago, the mutang 
declared that the Smallpox Spirit or devil (who must always 
be referred to with great respect as "His Excellency") would 
not leave unless allowed to ride horseback clear to the Korean 
boundary, three hundred miles away; and a gayly caparisoned 
horse was accordingly led the entire distance for His Excel- 
lency, the Smallpox Spirit, to ride away on! 

The government was also unfeignedly corrupt. Offices were 
given, just as lives were taken merely at the whim of the 
Throne. Taxes were farmed out, the grafting collectors 
taking from the people probably five or six times as much as 
finally reached the public treasury. More than this, the 
nobility robbed the people at will, and there was no authority 
from whom they could get redress. Woe unto the man who 
became energetic and industrious under the old dispensation! 
First, the tax-gatherers would relieve him of the bulk of his 
swollen fortune, and what was left the noble or "Yang-ban," 
as a noble was called, would take the trouble to borrow but 
never take the trouble to repay. For the Yang-ban was a 
"gentleman," he was. It was beneath his dignity to work — 
even to guide the reins of the horse he rode — but it was not 
beneath his dignity to sponge on his friends (I think the verb 
"to sponge" is too expressive to remain slang) or to borrow 
without repaying. Moreover, in case of extremity, it is said 
that Mother Yang-ban and Sister Ann might take in washing, 
as is recorded in the classic lays of our own land, but Father 
never defiled himself by doing anything so dishonorable as 
an honest day's work. 

But alas and alack! for the degeneracy of our times. The 
Yang-bans in Korea have been deprived of their ancient priv- 



KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 67 

ileges, and I fear that even their fellows in America are by 
no means treated with the ancient deference and respect due 
to persons of such exalted merit and blue-blood. 

What with the arbitrary and oppressive system of tax-robbery 
and the extortions of the Yang-bans it is not surprising that 
the Koreans here became disinclined to labor, while those 
who went to Manchuria, where there has been "proper se- 
curity for the gains of industry," are said to be quite a different 
folk — energetic because there has been encouragement to 
be energetic. The old Korean system of taxation being 
arbitrary, the only way to escape a raid by the tax-gatherer 
was to appear not to have anything worth raiding, and with 
the coinage confined usually to the copper "cash" (each 
"cash" worth a small fraction of a cent), it was difficult 
for a man to have much money without everybody knowing 
it. If a man had much he needed a warehouse to store it in. 
Mrs. Bishop in her book, already referred to, speaks of a time 
when it took 3200 "cash" to equal a dollar in our money, 
making each coin worth 1-32 of a cent, and it took six men or 
one pony to carry $50 worth of coin! Another instance is 
mentioned in the Japanese official Year Book on Korea. The 
Japanese army bought $5000 worth of timber in the interior, 
where the people were not used to any other currency, with 
the result that "the army had to charter a small steamer and 
fill her completely with this copper cash to finance the trans- 
action!" I bought a few long, necklace-like strings of this 
old Korean money at ten cents a string, and even then prob- 
ably paid too much. 

When I bought my ticket for Korea it was nominally an 
independent monarchy under a Japanese "protectorate," 
but the day before I sailed from San Francisco, Japanese 
aggression took another step and the country was formally 
annexed as a part of the Japanese Empire. There is little 
doubt, I suppose, that the Japanese will give the Koreans 
better government than the old monarchy gave them, but one 



68 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

cannot excuse all the methods by which Japan fastened her 
rule on the island. Yesterday morning I went out to the Old 
North Palace, a deserted and melancholy memorial of van- 
ished power, stood on the throne where Korean kings once 
held audience, and saw the royal dwelling in which the Jap- 
anese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895, and also saw the 
place where they burned her body. The Japanese minister 
at that time was recalled and placed on trial for the offence, 
and, though he escaped conviction, the evidence of his guilt 
was undoubted. It has been estimated that in about eighteen 
months in 1907-'08, "12,916 Koreans, called 'insurgents' by 
the Japanese and patriots by their fellow countrymen, were 
killed by the Mikado's soldiers and gendarmes, only 160 of 
whom lost their lives." This looks more like butchery than 
war. Moreover, the Japanese themselves have to admit that 
there were inexcusable delays in paying for land seized from 
Koreans, and in \dew of all the circumstances it is questionable 
whether the Korean hatred or dislike of Japan will become very 
much less cordial than it is to-day. 

Perhaps in no country in the world has missionary work 
been more successful than in Korea (there are probably 125,000 
Protestants now, while there were only 777 thirteen years 
ago), and I have been interested to learn that there is abso- 
lutely no truth in the Japanese newspaper reports that im- 
mense numbers of native Christians are leaving the church 
since annexation. On the contrary, reports from all over 
the country are good, and Seoul itself is just now in the midst 
of a most thoroughgoing and successful Christian revival, with 
1800 conversions reported during the first ten days. At a 
Methodist mission school I visited this morning I found that 
a hundred of the native pupils had been canvassing the town 
a part of three successive afternoons with the result that 
they had brought in the names of 697 Koreans expressing a 
desire to become Christians. 

Here in Korea there is no waste of energy or money through 



KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" 69 

denominational divisions. Each denomination has its own 
sphere of activity, preventing dupKcation of effort, and my 
general observation has convinced me that the criticisms of 
foreign mission work sometimes heard in America are based 
on a radical misconception of conditions. Even the non- 
Christians, in the great ^majority of cases, speak in high 
praise of the isplendid work of the missionaries. A typical 
expression is that found in the latest issue of the Shanghai 
National Review, now before me, which may be expected to 
speak impartially. Referring to an address by Doctor Mor- 
rison, the Peking correspondent of the London Times, it says: 

"Doctor Mon-ison eulogized the work of the missionaries and we cannot 
conceive that anybody who really knows of their work at first hand, not as it 
is to be foT'r>d in extreme cases, but as ordinarily carried on, should do other- 
wise thni eulogize it." 

Seoul, Korea. 




VIII 

MANCHURIA- FAIR AND FERTILE 

NEASILY sleeps Mukden to-night" — I remember 
yet how one of the dispatches began which brought 
so vividly to my mind the meaning of the great 
death-grapple here between the Japanese and Rus- 
sian hosts in 1905.* The story in a nutshell is this : 

" After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden, 
where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from 
February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in 
modem history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men 
were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Km-opatkin retreated in fairly good 
order about a hundred miles north of Mukden." 

So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle 
five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have 
come. What Gettsyburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden 
was in the first great contest between the white race and the 
Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his 
gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the 



* " Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night. In the main street lamps burn dimly. 
Along dark roads in heavy dust are marching columns. The cool night is 
full of the low rustle of movement. Near the station, in over-filled hospitals, 
are heard low groans. The wounded arrive in a never-ceasing stream of carts, 
and another stream of ambulances moves northward, for the place must be 
cleared for to-day's victims. The eternal pines whisper above the Tombs of 
Chinese Emperors. In the fields watch fires are burning stores and evacuated 

villages " And the correspondent goes on to tell of the wearied forces 

gathering for further fighting with the coming of dawn — men footsore and 
weak for want of food and water and rest. For forty-eight hours the Japanese 
had not eaten. 

70 



MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 71 

windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles 
of snowy trenches. 

I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at 
one time the Japanese thought themselves beaten in the battle 
and had ordered a retreat, when, a Russian force giving way, 
they turned quickly to press the advantage and snatched victory 
from what they had thought was ruin. There are many stories, 
too, of the inefficiency of the Russian officers, stories made all 
the more probable in the light of the Russian Commander 
Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect. "Why, the 
English would put one of their admirals against the wall and 
shoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of 
duty as went entirely unpunished among Russian generals," 
was one man's comment as he talked with me. "The Roo- 
shians were good fighters — fought 'and to 'and with the 
butt of their muskets — and if they 'ad 'ad good commanders 
the Japs would never have won," said an Englishman who 
had seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the 
debauchery and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable 
women travelling regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness 
being also common. About the same charges were reported 
to me by a Japanese officer. In fact, it is said that the Japanese 
contrived to get a very considerable quantity of champagne 
to the Russian headquarters one day, and the next day made 
a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossack com- 
manders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much 
drinking ! 

The truth is that the Japanese, from camp-followers to 
commander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians 
were not. From the day that Russia, aided by France and 
Germany, forced Japan to cede back to China some of the fruits 
of her victory over the Chinese, from that hour Japan nursed 
and fed fat her rankling grudge and bided her time as deliber- 
ately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was in Japan an 
Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced Japan 



72 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see the tre- 
mendous interest in the military drills in all the Japanese 
schools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank 
answer: "We are getting ready to lick Russia." 

It should also be observed that when the war came on the 
Japanese were not only in a state of preparedness so far as 
battleships and army drill and munitions of war were con- 
cerned, but they were also prepared in the vital matter of proper 
medical attendance. 

"When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba 
the army was utterly without proper medical corps and equip- 
ment, and the death-rate was disgracefully high. But the first 
Japanese who fell in crossing the Yalu were taken at once to 
the best of Japanese surgeons and cared for in the most ap- 
proved of modern military hospitals." So said a frank Scotch- 
man to me yesterday, and in the hght of the official statistics 
I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasant allusion to 
America. When the war with Russia ended. Baron Takaki, 
Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, boasted that whereas 
in the Spanish-America War "fourteen men died from prevent- 
able diseases to one man killed on the field of battle," the 
Japanese had lost only one man from disease to every four from 
bullets. Now the Japanese, as usual, had not worked out 
any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and 
hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable record, 
but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the 
white man's inventions and getting as much or more — more 
in this case — out of them than the white man himseK. 

The Japanese record, showing in such amazing fashion 
what a wisely directed health organization may accomplish, 
is worth remembering not only in connection with plans for 
military efficiency, but also in connection with plans for general 
public health activities at home. Every State should spend 
five times as much for this public health work as at present. 

In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces 



MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 73 

of the fierce contest that only five or six years ago scarred its 
bosom, and the serried shocks of newly harvested corn, kaoliang 
(sorghum) and millet — in some infrequent instances fertil- 
ized by the dead men's bones — are seen on fields where con- 
tending armies struggled. Let it be so for a little while; let 
the Manchurian peasant sow and garner in peace while he may ; 
for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China's Three Eastern 
Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's blood may 
redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended 
is to me perfectly clear. By reason of the Japanese railroad 
monopoly through the very heart of Southern Manchuria, 
and her leased territory on the coast, Japan has obtained power 
bordering on control, and everything goes to show that she 
has fully made up her mind to complete and retain that control. 

Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire, 
it is easy to understand how it has now roused the covetousness 
of Japan just as the temptation a few years ago proved too 
strong for Russia. Immense farming areas are only thinly 
settled; some of the richest of the world's mineral resources 
have only been touched. 

A day or two ago I went out to see Mr. Edward C. Parker, 
in charge of the agricultural experiment farm here (he is a 
Minnesota man, I believe), and found him enthusiastic over his 
corn crop just harvested. "I have been so surprised by the 
growth of corn this year," he declared, "that I could hardly 
believe my own eyes. I have never seen finer seed ears any- 
where." Among American states, only Iowa, he declares, 
is probably more fertile than Manchuria; with stock-raising 
to prevent land-deterioration, all the vast southern section 
could beat Illinois growing crops, and the same thing could 
be said of the northern country but for its colder climate. 
About Harbin, where the South Manchuria Railway joins the 
Trans-Siberian Line, one may see cuts thirty feet deep and the 
soil rich to the bottom. Most of Manchuria is level — strik- 
ingly like our Western Corn Belt and Wheat Belt — and the 



74 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

soil is of wind-drift origin "like a great snow-blanket," very 
easily tilled. The plowing is done with a steel-tipped wooden 
beam such as I have already written of seeing in Korea, and 
only the favoring physical texture of the soil explains the fat 
harvests of food, feed, and fuel achieved under such methods. 
It has been a positive joy to me in travelling through the 
country here in late October to see the great shocks of kaoliang, 
millet and corn (even with labor at 20 cents a day out here, 
the people don't pull fodder!), quaint-looking farmhouses 
almost surrounded by well-stuffed barns, and corn cribs packed 
until the overflowing yellow ears spill out the ampler cracks. 
The kaoliang is a sort of sorghum, the grain being used for 
food, while the stalks, which contain but little sugar, are used 
for fuel. Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit and 
running over with 

" The garnered largess of the fruitful year" 

not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are 
used in Manchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchu- 
rian winters as well. I even find the peasants digging up the 
roots and stubble to be dried and burned in the houses. 

One sees but a small proportion of good horses here, and 
practically no four-wheeled farm wagons. Unlike Japan, how- 
ever, Manchuria does have its farm vehicles: great heavy 
two-wheeled carts drawn by from two to eight horses, donkeys, 
and asses. Sometimes there is a big horse or two, then one or 
two donkeys half the size of the horses, and a couple of little 
asses or burros half the size of the donkeys — and maybe a bull 
thrown in for good measure. It looks as if the Whole Blamed 
Family of work-stock had been hitched to pull the cart. The 
Whole Blamed Family is often needed, too, for the roads in 
China are ample proof that we needn't expect ours in America 
or anywhere else to get any better by letting them alone three 
thousand years. The Chinese have tried it, and it doesn't 
work. The October roads are so bad in many places that if 



MANCHURIA: FAIR AND FERTILE 75 

the carts had four wheels instead of two not even the combined 
aggregation in the team could pull them out of the mud. A 
little later, however, the roads freeze over solidly and stay so 
for five or six months — and then the Manchurian farmers 
go on long, slow pilgrimages carrying their products to the 
larger markets — sometimes two or three hundred miles from 
home. 

The pride and glory of Manchuria, the talk of its citizens, 
the foundation of its prosperity, the backbone of its commerce, 
the symbol of its wealth, is the bean — the common soja, or 
soy bean as we know it. What corn is to our Corn Belt and 
what cotton is to our Southern States, that the bean is to Man- 
churia: supreme among products. There is no class of people 
not affected by the prosperity or the adversity of his Majesty 
the Bean. Bankers, merchants, farmers, even the ladies one 
meets in the drawing-rooms in the foreign concessions, not 
only "know beans,*' but can talk beans too. If the present 
rate of progress is maintained, it will not be long until no one 
will enumerate the world's great crops — wheat, corn, oats, 
rice, rye, barley, cotton, etc. — without including beans. The 
first beans were shipped to Europe only about four years ago, 
and the London Times correspondent estimates that next year 
Europe will take $35,000,000 worth. In a very great measure 
the beans have the same properties as cottonseed, an oil being 
extracted that is used for much the same purposes as cotton- 
seed oil, while the residue called "bean cake" is about the 
equivalent of cottonseed meal. It is somewhat superior, Mr. 
Parker says, to cottonseed meal or linseed meal as a stock 
feed, but is now chiefly used for fertilizing purposes. My first 
acquaintance with the bean cake was in Japan, where I found 
it enriching the earth for vegetable-growing, Japan importing 
an average of half a million tons a year to put under its crops. 
Manchuria also uses not a little for the same purpose. The 
more intelligent Manchurian farm^ers, however, are learning 
that it is a waste to rot one of the best cattle feeds in the 



76 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

world and get its fertilizing value only — just as our American 
farmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to the 
disgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producw 
without first getting its other value as a meat-producer. 

I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography 
led me to believe was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China 
or Mongolia alongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at 
all, but chiefly a great grass plain with golden possibilities as 
a cattle country. Mr. Parker declares that if cattle were 
grown on these immense ranges and brought to Manchuria 
in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake, millet, etc., Harbin, 
Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities might soon 
build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness. 
This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of 
maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those 
sections of America where the policy of selling everything off 
the land and putting nothing back threatens disaster. 

The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up 
as high as the little plows will permit and the crops planted on 
top, is the general practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an 
effort through the experiment farm to convince the people of 
the advantages of level cultivation. He also wishes to intro- 
duce better plows. "The truth is," he says, "that we never 
had any real plows until James Oliver and John Deere invented 
theirs. All the plowing before that was merely scratch-work, 
and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than those 
the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like, 
wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly 
make enough to subsist on." 

In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and 
in Manchuria I have also found a few patches, though the cli- 
mate here is obviously too cold for its profitable production. 
I find that the Japanese have great faith in the future of the 
industry in Korea. 

This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete 



MANCHURIA- FAIR AND FERTILE 77 

without some mention of the queer aspect of many of the 
cultivated fields — thick- dotted with earth mounds, around 
which the rows are curved and twisted, these mounds resembling 
medium-sized potato hills. They contain not vegetables, how- 
ever, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound is a Chinaman's 
grave. I first noticed this method of burying in Korea, but 
the mounds are quite low there — all that I saw, at least, 
except the Queen's Tomb at Seoul. Here in Manchuria they 
are about three or four feet high in most cases, and sometimes 
six. One of the famous sights of Mukden is the Peilang, or 
Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun, the first great Manchu 
Emperor of China, lies buried, and the grave proper (reached 
after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificent gates, 
images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an 
acre in extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty 
feet high and surrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped 
summit runs up about twenty feet higher. The Chinese have 
a deep-rooted superstition as to the existence of a sort of devil 
or "fung-shui" in the ground, and to disturb this fung-shui 
may prove the direful spring of more "woes unnumbered" 
than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed to exist 
under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs, 
and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking 
had to nm twenty-five miles out of its proper course in order 
not to disturb it. 

Mukden, Manchuria. 




IX 

WHERE JAPAN IS ABSORBING AN EMPIRE 

^ HE Open Door in Manchuria — of what concern 
is it to me any more than the revolution in Portugal 
or the Young Turks movement in Constantinople?" 
With some such expression the average American 
is likely to dismiss the question — a question whose determi- 
nation may prove the pivot on which will swing the greatest 
world-movements of our time as well as the prosperity of many 
European and American industries, and that of the labor de- 
pendent upon them. 



Concerning Manchuria and all the issues involved in the 
present struggle for its possession, all kinds of misconceptions 
are rife. That it is a small country; that It is an infertile 
country; that it must be already well developed in point of 
population and consumption of goods: this is only the ABC 
of Manchurian misinformation. 

In answer, it need only be said that Manchuria is larger 
than all our New England, Middle, and South Atlantic States 
from Maine to Georgia Inclusive, and that Into Its borders all 
of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), together with 
all of the German Empire, could be crowded, and still leave a 
gap so big that Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland would lack 
thousands of square miles of filling it: while as to population 
Manchuria has only 18,000,000 people as compared with 

78 



JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 79 

118,000,000 in the European countries just mentioned. And 
after having travelled in all of them as well as in Manchuria 
I should say that the Asiatic area is the more fertile. 

The possibilities of such an empire situated in the fairest 
portion of Asia's temperate zone are simply illimitable. No one 
who has been through the fruitful lands of the American Corn 
Belt and Wheat Belt and goes later through Manchuria can 
fail to note the similarity between them in physical appear- 
ance and natural resources, and it may well be that what the 
settlement of the West has meant in America these last fifty 
years the development of Manchuria will mean in Asia these 
next fifty. 

In itself the sheer creation of such a country — larger far 
than Great Britain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Mani- 
toba — would appeal at once to American commerce and in- 
dustry, but you have only begun to grasp the significance of 
Manchuria when you compare it to the creation of such an 
empire in some favored portion of the sea. 

Manchuria means all this, but it means more : Its possession 
would give such vastly increased influence to any Power pos- 
sessing it as to make that Power a menace to the commercial 
rights of all other nations in Asia — rights of almost vital 
importance both to Europe and America. England and Ger- 
many, of course, are already dependent upon foreign trade for 
their prosperity, and President McKinley was never so seer- 
like as when, in his last speech at Buffalo, he reminded the 
American people that their own future greatness depends upon 
the development of trade beyond the seas. And it was to Asia, 
the greatest of continents, and especially to China, the greatest 
of countries on this greatest of continents, that he looked, 
as we must also look to-day. In Secretary Hay's memorial 
address on McKinley, which I had the good fortune to hear, 
the dead President's determined efforts to maintain the ancient 
integrity of the Dragon Empire were fittingly mentioned as one 
of his most distinguished services to his people and his time. 



80 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

To keep the immense area of China from spoliation by other 
nations and to preserve to all peoples equal commercial rights 
within boundaries are absolutely essential to the proper future 
development of both European and American commerce and 
industry. 

II 

This is why the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of very 
real concern to every Occidental citizen; this is why the other 
nations after the ending of the Russo-Japanese War were care- 
ful to see that these belligerents guaranteed a continuance of 
the Open Door policy; this is why it is of importance to us to 
know whether this pledge is being kept. 

In centering my attention upon Japan in this article let 
me say in the outset, I am not to be understood as being one 
whit more tolerant of Russian than of Japanese aggression in 
Manchuria — I am not. In the Russo-Japanese War my sym- 
pathies were all with Japan, my present friendships with num- 
bers of her sons I prize very highly, but I cannot blind myself 
to the fact that she is apparently "drunk with sight of power" 
in the Orient. 

As conditions are to-day, the reason for giving primary atten- 
tion to Japan's position in Manchuria rather than Russia's 
must be self-evident. In the first place, the territory embraced 
in her sphere of influence is more important and contains two 
thirds the population. Then again: Northern Manchuria 
being cold and inhospitable, Japan's sphere not only covers 
the fairer and more favored section agriculturally, but from the 
standpoint of military strategy (as a mighty war taught all 
the world) Japan is vastly better placed. With Port Arthur 
in her possession, and the new broad-gauge line from Antung 
and Mukden enabling her to rush troops across the Sea of 
Japan and through Korea to Manchuria without once getting 
into foreign waters or on foreign soil, she could ask nothing 
better. And finally and most significant of all, Russia has 





LIKE SCENES FROM OUR WESTERN PRAIRIES 
Manchuria is a vast empire — one of the most fertile portions of the earth's 
surface. The great money crop is the soy bean, and the lower picture shows 
miles of beans and bean-cake awaiting shipment at Changchun 




MANC'IIIRIAN WOMEN (SHOWING PECULIAR HEAD-DRESS) 




(IIIXKSK WASTE-PAPKH COLLEICTI lU 
Everything in China is scrupulously saved — except human labor. That is 
wasted on a colossal scale through the failure to use improved machinery or 
scientific knowledge 



JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 83 

suffered perhaps the greatest humiliation in her history by rea- 
son of Manchurian aggression; she has learned Japan's point 
of vantage; and whatever advance she makes in the near future 
will be only by Japanese sufferance and connivance. 

Whatever may be the meaning of the alleged secret treaty 
between Japan and Russia, the great truth which all nations 
need to remember is this: Whatever scotches Japanese aggres- 
sion in Manchuria scotches Russian aggression at the same time 
— automatically and simultaneously. To the Open Door in 
Manchuria Japan carries the key. 



Ill 



Japan's primary commercial advantage over all other nations 
in South Manchuria, her railway monopoly, together with the 
use she is making of this monopoly and her plans to maintain 
it, we must now consider more in detail. 

When the war with Russia ended, Japan succeeded Russia 
in the control of what is now the South Manchurian Railway, 
running from Dairen (formerly Dalny) to Chang-chun, 438 
miles, through the very heart of the country, and she also ob- 
tained from China the right "to maintain and work the military 
line constructed between Antung and Mukden and" — as if 
of secondary importance — "to improve the said line so as to 
make it fit for the conveyance of commercial and industrial 
goods of all nations." The stipulation with regard to the South 
Manchurian Railway was that China should have the right to 
buy it back in 1938, and with regard to the Antung-Mukden 
line, in 1932, by paying the total cost — "all capital and all 
moneys owed on account of the line and interest." And just 
here Japan is playing a wily game. 

Consider, for example, the Antung-Mukden line just re- 
ferred to, now regarded as a part of the South Manchurian 
system. Although running through a very mountainous and 
sparsely settled area, it is of immense importance to Japan 



84 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

from a strategic standpoint, connecting Mukden as it does 
with the Japanese railway in Korea leading directly to Fusan, 
and thus enabling Japan to transport troops across her own ter- 
ritory to Manchuria without taking any of the risks involved in 
getting out of her own waters and boundaries. The paramount 
military importance of the line is further indicated by the fact 
that no one had thought of a commercial line here at all. 
Simply as a matter of war-time necessity Japan stretched a 
2|-foot narrow-gauge line across these mountain barrens to 
transport her troops in 1905. It is interesting to see, therefore, 
how she has now interpreted her right to "work, maintain and 
improve" — especially "improve" — this line. In October I 
spent two days travelhng over its entire length (188 miles), most 
of the time on the narrow-gauge part, and I was amazed to 
see on what a magnificent scale the new broad-gauge- substitute 
line is now building. In striking contrast to the traditional 
Japanese tendency to impermanence in building, this line is 
constructed regardless of expense as if to last for a thousand 
years. Tunnel after tunnel through solid rock, the most superb 
masonry and bridges wherever streams intervene, the best of 
ballast to make an enduring roadbed — all these indicate the 
style of the new, not "improved" but utterly reconstructed, 
line which is building for Japan's benefit at China's expense — 
at China's expense directly if she buys it back in 1932, at 
China's expense indirectly if she doesn't. 

It will be remembered, of course, that according to her 
agreement with China, Japan was to begin the work of "im- 
proving" the Antung-Mukden line within two years. Whether 
she was strangely unable to make any sort of beginning in the 
period, or whether she purposely delayed it in order to show her 
contempt for Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria, it is dijSScult to 
say; what is known is only that the Mikado's government let its 
treaty rights lapse, and then when China objected to a renewal, 
defied China, and proceeded with the work of "improvement" 
by what was euphemistically termed "independent action." 



JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 85 

Incidentally, it may be recalled just here that in the Ports- 
mouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia jointly promised the 
rest of the world "to exploit their respective railways in Man- 
churia exclusively for commercial and industrial purposes and 
in no wise for strategic purpose." 

That Japan (in the event no other method of getting control 
of Manchuria appears) hopes to make the railroads too expen- 
sive for the hard-pressed Peking government to buy back is 
self-evident. She is looking far ahead, as those interested in the 
continuance of the Open Door policy must also look far ahead. 
The real Open Door question is not a matter of the last four or 
five years or of the next four or five years, but whether after 
a comparatively short time the Door is to be permanently 
closed as in Korea. If it be said that Japan is only human 
in laying many plans to gain so rich an empire, let it also be 
said that other nations are only human if they wish to protect 
their own interests. 

IV 

For one thing, as has been suggested, Japan has a perfectly 
obvious plan to make the railways too expensive for China to 
purchase when the lease expires, and just here some compari- 
sons may be in order. In Japan proper the government- 
owned railway stations are severe and inexpensive structures 
in which not one yen is wasted for display and but little for 
convenience. When I was in Tokyo, for example, Ex-Premier 
Okuma, in a public interview, called attention to the disrepu- 
table condition and appearance of the leading station (Shim- 
bashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign tourists 
must inevitably have their general impressions of the country 
unfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is 
its appearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian 
Railway, also under the control of the Japanese Government 
(five sixths of the investment held by the government and one 



86 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

sixth by individual Japanese), one finds an entirely different 
policy in force. Handsome stations, built to accommodate 
traffic for fifty years to come, have been erected. In Dairen, 
"virtually the property of the railway company," the system 
has built a magnificent modern city — street railways, water- 
works, electric light plants, macadamized roads, and beautiful 
public parks. More than this, the railway company, not 
content with the best of equipment for every phase of legiti- 
mate railway work, including handsome stations and railway 
offices, such as Japan proper never sees, has also erected hotels 
which, for the Orient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five 
leading cities of Manchuria. Comparatively few travellers 
go to Mukden, and yet the hotel which the South Manchurian 
Railway has erected there, for example, is perhaps not excelled 
in point of furnishing and equipment anywhere in the Far East. 

In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected 
not only to pay for the railways themselves but for all the 
irrelevant enterprises — hotels, parks, cities — in which the 
railway companies have embarked; for lines "improved" 
beyond recognition, and for lines built not even with a view 
to ultimate profit, but for their strategic importance to a rival 
and possibly antagonist nation ! As an Englishman said to me : 
"It's much the same as if I, a poor man, should rent you a 
$1000 house, agreeing to stand the expense of some improve- 
ments when taking it back, and you should spend $10,000 in 
improving my $1000 house — and largely to suit your own 
peculiar business and purposes." 

More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep 
her absolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facili- 
ties. In Article IV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and 
Russia reciprocally engaged not to "obstruct any general meas- 
ures, common to all countries, which China may take for the 
development of the commerce and industry of Manchuria," 
but in December of the same year Japan caused China to yield a 
secret agreement prohibiting any new line "in the neighbor- 



JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 87 

hood of and parallel to" the South Manchurian Railway 
or any branch line that "might be prejudicial" to it. Japan, 
under threat of arms, forced China to abandon the plan for 
the Hsinmintun-Fakumen line after arrangements had been 
made with an English syndicate, and later Japan and Russia 
on the same pretext prevented the proposed Chinchow-Aigun 
line across Mongolia and Manchuria, although a hundred miles 
or more away from the South Manchurian line. 



That Japan, then, holds the whip hand in Manchuria, and 
expects to continue to hold it, is very clear. With China as 
yet too weak to protect herself, Japan is virtually master of 
the situation. Let us ask then — since this is in an American 
book — whether the Open Door policy is being enforced even 
now; to ask it of any one in Manchuria is to be laughed at. 
I tried it once in a Standard Oil ofl&ce and the man in front of 
me roared, and an unnoticed clerk at my back, overhearing 
so absurd a question, was also unable to contain his merri- 
ment. It is not a question of the fact of the shutting-up policy, 
Chinese and foreigners in Manchuria will tell you; it is only a 
question as to the extent of that condition. 

The truth is that the ink was hardly dry on the early trea- 
ties before the discriminations began. The military railroads, 
which Japan was in honor bound to all the world to use 
only for war purposes, were used for transporting Japanese 
goods before the military restrictions with regard to the admis- 
sion of other foreign goods were removed. The Chinese mer- 
chant and his patrons were famishing for cotton "piece goods" 
and other manufactured products, and the Japanese goods 
coming over were quickly taken up and a market for these 
particular "chops" or "trademarks" (the Chinaman relies 
largely on the chop) was established. By the time European 
and American goods came back their market in many cases 



88 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

had already been taken away. In some cases, too, their trade- 
mark rights had been virtually ruined by the closeness of Japa- 
nese imitation. Even on my recent tour, among consuls of three 
nations, at Manchurian points, I did not find one who did not 
mention some recent case of trademark infringement. 

Then came the period of freight discriminations and rebates, 
when the Japanese (principally the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, the 
one great octopus of Japanese business and commerce) secured 
freight rates that practically stifled foreign business competitors. 
The railway company now asserts that rebates (formerly 
allowed, it alleges, because of heavy shipments) are no longer 
given; but in many cases the evil effects of the former rebating 
policy remain in that Japanese traders were thus allowed to 
rush in during a formative period and establish permanent trade 
connections. 

Meanwhile, too, the relations between the Japanese Govern- 
ment and the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha are so close that competi- 
tors are virtually in the plight of having to ship goods over a 
line owned by a rival — without any higher tribunal to guar- 
antee equality of treatment. As was recently declared: 

"Two directors of the South Manchurian Railway are also directors of Mitsui 
Bussan Kaisha. The traflBc manager of the railway is an ex-employee of Mit- 
sui. The customs force at Dalny is not only entirely Japanese — no other 
foreigner in charge of a Chinese customs office employs exclusively assistants 
of his own nationality — but a number of the customs inspectors are ex-employ- 
ees of Mitsui. The Mitsui company also maintains branches all through 
Manchuria in and out of treaty ports. In this way they escape the payment 
of Chinese likin, or toll taxes. The Chinese have agreed that these taxes — 
2 per cent, on the value of the goods each time they pass to a new inland town 

— shall not be paid so long as they remain in the hands of the foreigner. Amer- 
ican piece goods often pay likin tax, two, three, or four times, while the Japa- 
nese — sometimes legitimately by reason of their branch houses, sometimes 
illegally by bluffing Chinese officials or smuggling through their military areas 

— manage to escape likin almost altogether." " • -^ ' 

It may not be true that the Japanese customs officials at 
Dairen (the treaty provides that China shall appoint a Japanese 



JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 89 

collector at this port), ignorantly or knowingly, allow Japanese 
goods to be smuggled through to Manchuria — although con- 
suls of three nations a few months ago thought the matter 
serious enough to suggest an investigation — but the evasion 
of likin taxes in the interior is an admitted fact. 

More flagrant still is another violation of international 
treaty rights. Under Chinese regulations foreign merchants 
are not allowed to do business in the Manchurian interior away 
from the twenty-four open marts, but it has been shown that 
several thousand Japanese are now stationed within the pro- 
hibited area, and Japan's reply to the Chinese Viceroy's protest 
is that he should have objected sooner and that it is now too 
late. Meanwhile, many Chinese merchants both in the in- 
terior and along the South Manchurian Railway, themselves 
paying the regular likin and consumption taxes, are finding 
themselves unable to compete with the Japanese, who refuse 
to pay these taxes. Thus Japan is gradually rooting out the 
natives who stand in her way, and, day by day, tightening her 
grip on the country. 

She is advancing step by step as she did in Korea. 

On the whole, the Mikado's subjects seem already to count 
themselves virtual masters of the country. Inside their railway 
areas and concessions they have their own government; in the 
majority of cases while in Manchuria I found it more convenient 
to use the Japanese telegraph or the Japanese postal system 
than the Chinese; and where I stopped at the little towns along 
the line it was a Japanese oflBcer who came to inquire my name 
and nationality. When I was in Mukden the German consul 
there had just had two Chinese meddlers arrested for spying 
on his movements, only to find that they were acting under 
the direction of Japanese oflacials who claimed immunity for 
them! The fact that they have their soldiers back of them, 
and that they can be tried only in their own courts, also gives 
the Japanese unlimited assurance in bullying the natives. 
At Mukden the Japanese bellboy struck my Chinese rickshaw 



90 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

man to get his attention. At Taolu some weeks ago some Japa- 
nese merchants who were there doing business illegally (for it 
is not an open mart) were interfered with, with the result that 
the Japanese authorities when I was in Mukden were preparing 
a formal demand for satisfaction, including indemnity for any 
injury to an unlawful business ! 

Manifestly, the new masters of Manchuria propose to teach 
the natives their place. " If a Chinaman is killed by a Japanese 
bullet," as a Chinaman of rank said to me in Manchuria, "the 
fault is not that of the man who fired the bullet: the Chinaman 
is to blame for getting in the way of it!" 

VI 

Those who apologize for Japanese aggressiveness in Man- 
churia, those who excuse or sympathize with her evident pur- 
pose to make Manchuria walk the way of Korea, have but one 
argument for their position — the pitiably abused and thread- 
bare plea that the Japanese have won the country by the 
blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answer to 
this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty China- 
man just mentioned. "The Japanese," said he, "claimed 
they were fighting Russia because she was preparing to 
rob China of Manchuria; now they themselves out-Russia 
Russia. It is much as if I should knock a man down, saying, 
'That man was about to take your watch,' and then take the 
watch myself!" 

The aptness of the simile is evident. My sympathy, and 
the sympathy of every other American acquaintance of mine 
as far as I can now recall, was with Japan in her struggle be- 
cause of our hot indignation over Russian aggressiveness. But 
if Japan had said, "I am fighting to put Russia out only that 
I may myself develop every identical policy of aggrandize- 
ment that she has inaugurated," it is very easy to see with what 
different feelings we should have regarded the conflict. 



JAPAN IN MANCHURIA 91 

Moreover, Japan's legitimate fruits of victory do not extend 
to the control or possession of Manchuria. As one of the 
ablest Englishmen met on my tour in the Far East pointed 
out, Japan's purposes in inaugurating the war were four: (1) 
to get a preponderating inj3uence in Korea; (2) to get the 
control of the Tsushima Straits, which a preponderating influ- 
ence in Korea would give her; (3) to drive Russia from her 
ever-menacing position at Port Arthur; and (4) to arrest (as 
she alleged) the increasing influence and power of Russia in 
Manchuria. 

All these things she has gained. Furthermore, she now has 
actual possession of Korea. The menace of a great Russian 
navy has been swept away. Again, she has become (with the 
consent of England) the commanding naval power in the eastern 
Pacific; and she has gained an influence in South Manchuria 
at least equal to that which Russia had previous to the war. 

And yet one hears the plea that unless she gets Manchuria 
her blood will have been spilt without result! Unless she can 
do more in the way of robbing China than she went to war with 
Russia for doing, she will not be justified ! 

Among representatives of five nations with whom I discussed 
the matter in Manchuria I found no dissent from the opinion 
that Japan will never get out of Manchuria, unless forced to 
do so by a speedily awakened China or by the most emphatic 
and unmistakable attitude on the part of the Powers. Chinese, 
English, Americans, Germans — all nationalities — in Man- 
churia agree that thus far the way of Manchuria has been 
the way of Korea and that only favoring circumstances — a 
rebellion fomented in China or whatever excuse may serve — is 
needed for the same end to be reached. 

Then with Japanese customs duties to complete the shutting 
out of foreign goods, now made only partially possible by the 
discrimination of a railway monopoly, and with the entire Chi- 
nese Empire and foreign trade rights within it menaced by the 
added preeminence of Japan, the people of Europe and America 



92 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

may wake up too late to find out at last that the Open Door 
in Manchuria is a matter of somewhat more general impor- 
tance than the disturbances in Turkey or the change of govern- 
ment in Portugal. 

Be it said, in conclusion, however, that if the white nations 
take heed in time all this may be prevented. China's walking 
up may serve the same purpose, but it is doubtful whether 
she will develop sufficient military strength for this. In any 
case there need be and should be no war, and in describing con- 
ditions as I found them my purpose is to help the cause of peace 
and not that of bloodshed. For if the Powers realize the seri- 
ousness of the situation and give evidence of such feeling to 
Japan that she will realize the bounds of safety, there will be 
no trouble. But a continued policy of ignorance, indifference, 
or inactivity means that Japan will probably go so far that she 
cannot retreat without a struggle. Tru.th is in the interest 
of peace. 

Mukden, Manchuria. 



LIGHT FROM CHINA ON PROBLEMS AT HOME 

1AM here in China's ancient capital at one of the most in- 
teresting periods in all the four thousand years that the 
Son of Heaven has ruled the Middle Kingdom. The old 
China is dying — fast dying; a new China is coming into 
being so rapidly as to amaze even those who were most expec- 
tant of rapid change. The dreams of twelve years ago, that 
have since seemed nothing but dreams, are coming into actual 
realization. 

Great reforms were then proposed — twelve years ago — 
and the Emperor sanctioned edict after edict for their intro- 
duction. But their hour had not yet come. 

I talked yesterday with one of the men whose voice was 
most potent at that time: a man whose heart was then aflame 
with the idea of remaking China. They dared much, did 
these men, and Tantsetung, a Chinaman of high rank and a 
Christian, consecrated himself on his knees to the great task, 
with all the devotion of a Hannibal swearing allegiance to 
Carthage. But reaction came. The Emperor was deposed 
and the Empress Dowager substituted, and Tantsetung and 
five other leaders were beheaded. 

Now, however, dying Tantsetung's brave words have already 
been fulfilled: "You may put me to death, but a thousand 
others wiU rise up to preach the same doctrine." A new reign 
has come; the Empress Dowager, dying, has been succeeded 
by a mere boy, whose father, the Prince Regent, holds the 
imperial sceptre. But the sceptre is no longer all-powerful. 

93 



94 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

For the first time in all the cycles of Cathay the voice of the 
people is stronger than the voice of the Throne. Men do not 
hesitate any day to say things for which, ten years ago, they 
would have paid the penalty with their heads. 

There are many things that give one faith in the future 
of China, but nothing else which begets such confidence as 
the success of the crusade against the opium habit. Four 
years ago, when the news went out that China had resolved 
to put an end to the opium habit within ten years — had 
started on a ten years' war against opium — there were many 
who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quix- 
otic even for praise; there were more who regarded it as 
praiseworthy but as beiaig as unpromising as a drunkard's 
swearing off at New Year's, while those who expected success 
to come even in twice ten years hardly dared express their 
confidence among well-informed people. 

"If there is anything which all our contact with the Chinese 
has taught more unquestionably than anything else, it is that 
the Chinaman will always be a slave to the opium habit." 
So said a professedly authoritative American book on China, 
published only five years ago, and to hold any other opinion 
was usually regarded as contradictory to common sense. " We 
white Americans can't get rid of whiskey intemperance with 
all our moral courage and all our civilization and all our Chris- 
tianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorant China- 
man to shake off the clutches of opium?" So it was said, 
but to-day the most tremendous moral achievement of recent 
history — China's victory over opium-intemperance already 
assured and in great measure completed, not in ten years, but 
in four — stands out as a stinging rebuke to the slow progress 
our own people have made in their warfare against drink- 
intemperance. 

To shake off the opium habit when once it has gripped a 
man is no easy task. Officials right here in Peking, for 
example, died as a result of stopping too suddenly after the 



LIGHT FROM CHINA 95 

edict came out announcing that no opium victim could remain 
in the public service. But a member of the Emperor's cabi- 
net, or Grand Council, tells me that 95 per cent, of the 
public officials who were formerly opium-smokers have given 
up the habit, or have been dismissed from office. Five 
per cent, may smoke in secret, but with the constant menace 
of dismissal hanging like a Damocles sword over their heads, 
it may be assumed that even these few are breaking them- 
selves from the use of the drug. 

Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to 
his guests, but the Chinese have now quite a changed public 
sentiment. Because they recognize that opium is ruining the 
lives of many of their people, and lessening the efficiency of 
many others, because they regard it as a source of weakness to 
their country and danger to their sons, it has become a matter 
of shame for a man to be known as an opium-smoker, even 
"in moderation." To be free from such an enervating dis- 
sipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's 
family, but to the country as well : it is a patriotic duty. I saw 
a cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which 
there were held up to especial scorn and humiliation the weak- 
ling officials who had lost their offices by reason of failure to 
shake off opium. In short, the opium-smoker, instead of being 
a sort of "good fellow with human weaknessess" — and with 
possibilities, of course, of going utterly to wreck — has become 
an object of contempt, a bad citizen. 

The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated 
in the great financial sacrifices made by farmers and land- 
owners in sections where the opium poppy was formerly grown. 
The culture of the poppy in some sections was far more prof- 
itable than that of any other crop; it was, in fact, the "money 
crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growing the opium poppy 
has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, in the profit 
and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of 
old land values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had 



9G WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

been home-owners became homeless. And yet China has 
thought no price too great to pay in the effort to free herself 
from this form of intemperance. Well may her leading men 
proudly declare, as one did to me to-day: "While America 
dares not undertake the task of stopping the whiskey curse 
among less than a hundred million people, we are stopping the 
opium curse among over four hundred millions." It should 
also be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At 
a dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth 
while to mention as a matter of general interest to her guests 
(so rare is the occurrence) that she had seen a drunken China- 
man that day. I have not yet seen one. 

China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into 
industrial competition with all the world, and I am glad that 
she is. I believe that every strong and worthy . nation is 
enriched by the proper development of every other nation. 
But in this coming struggle the people whom vice or dissipation 
has rendered weak sooner or later must go down before the 
men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious habit, keep 
th^ir bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder tones 
indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. 
If we are to maintain our high place among the nations of the 
earth, if we are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, 
we can do it only by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the 
yellow man of the Orient is doing in this respect, from every 
enervating influence that now weakens the physical stamina, 
blunts the moral sense, or befogs the brain. 

The new China is devoting itself to a number of other 
reforms to which the people of America may well give atten- 
tion. The curse of graft among her public officials ("squeeze" 
it is called over here) is one of the most deep-rooted cancers 
with which she has to contend. Officers have been paid small 
salaries and have been allowed to make up for the meagre- 
ness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees and tips. 
Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will 



LIGHT FROM CHINA 97 

doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and ** squeeze" 
system, stop grafting, and put all the more important offices 
on a strict salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying 
county and city officials in the United States, as my readers 
know, we have often let enormous sums go into office-holders' 
pockets when they should have gone into improving our roads 
and schools. The Chinese system not only has this weakness, 
but by reason of the fact that the fees are not regularly fixed 
by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for number- 
less other abuses. 

Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in 
importance to the abolition of "squeeze." There is no na- 
tional currency here; each province (or state, as we would 
say) issues its own money when it pleases, just as the different 
American states did two generations ago. I remember hear- 
ing" an old man tell of going from the Carolinas to Alabama 
about 1840 and having to pay heavy exchange to get his Car- 
olina money changed into Alabama money. So it is in China 
to-day. You must get your bills of one bank or province 
changed whenever you go into another bank or province, 
paying an outrageous discount, and a banking corporation 
will even discount a bill issued by another branch of the 
same corporation. Thus a friend of mine with a five-dollar 
Russia-Asiatic banknote from the Peking branch on taking 
it to the Russia-Asiatic's branch at Hankow gets only $4.80 
for it. 

Nor is this all: All kinds of money are in circulation, the 
values constantly fluctuating, and hundreds and thousands 
of men make a living by "changing money," getting a per- 
centage on each transfer. Take the so-called 20-cent pieces 
in circulation; they lack a little of weighing one fifth as much 
as the 100-cent dollar; consequently it takes sometimes 110 
and again 112 cents "small coin" to equal one dollar! The 
whole system is absurd, of course, and yet when the govern- 
ment proposes to establish a uniform national currency it is 



98 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

said that the influence of these money-changers is so great 
as to make any reform exceedingly slow and difficult. 

And yet let not my readers at home with this statement be- 
fore them proceed too hastily to laugh or sneer at China for 
unprogressiveness. For my part, as I have thought of this 
matter of money transfer over here, the whole question has 
seemed to me to be on all-fours with our question of land title 
transfers at home, and the more I have thought of it the firmer 
has the conviction become. In fact, China's failure to adopt 
a modern currency system is perhaps even less a sinning against 
light than our failure to adopt the Torrens system of register- 
ing land titles. The man who makes a living by changing 
money and investigating its value is no more a parasite than 
the man who makes a living changing titles or investigating 
their value; the hindrance of trade and easy transfer of prop- 
erty is no more excusable in one case than the other; and the 
90 per cent, that China might save by a better system of 
money transfers is paralleled by the 90 per cent, that we might 
save by a better system of title transfers. 

Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the 
expense of the people, prevents currency reform in China — • 
yes, that is true. But before we assume superior airs let us 
see if Mr. Title-Changing Lawyer, also fattening needlessly 
at the expense of the people, does not go to our next legis- 
lature and stifle any measure for reforming land-title registra- 
tion. And in saying this I am not to be understood as making 
any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or 
our American lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens 
system I know are lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought 
to be content with the really useful ways of earning money 
and not insist on keeping up utterly useless and indefensible 
means of getting fees out of the people. Such lawyers, indeed, 
deserve honor; my criticism is aimed only at those who realize 
the wisdom of a changed system but are led by selfishness 
to oppose it. 



LIGHT FROM CHINA 99 

After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic 
reform in the new China is the changed policy of the schools. 
For thousands of years the education has been exclusively 
literary. The aim has been to produce scholars. A thorough 
knowledge of the works of the sages and poets, and the ability 
to write learned essays or beautiful verses, this has been the 
test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book on China 
five years ago he could say: 

" The Chinese scholar knows nothing of ancient or modern history (outside 
of China), geography, astronomy, zoology or physics. He knows perfectly well 
the dynastic history of his own coimtry and he composes beautiful poems, and 
these are his only accomplishments." 

But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting 
public officials by examination as to classical scholarship was 
abolished the year after Colonel Denby's book was published, 
and the new ideal of the school is to train men and women for 
useful living, for practical things, and to combine culture with 
utility. Japanese education now has the same aim. There, 
in fact, even the study of the languages is made to subserve 
a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latin and 
soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and con- 
tinues to read English and speak it on occasion the rest of his 
life, increasing his efficiency and usefulness in no small measure 
as a result. In Japan, too, I found the keenest interest in 
the teaching of agriculture to boys and domestic science to 
girls; and in all these things China is also moving — blunder- 
ingly, perhaps, but yet making progress — toward the most 
modern educational ideas. 

As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last 
ten years of making the schools train for more useful living, 
China and Japan have actually moved relatively much farther 
away from old standards than we have done, and if they 
should continue the same rate of advance for the next thirty 
years we may find their schools doing more for the efficiency 



100 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

of the people than our American schools are doing. And when 
I say this let not the cry go up that I am decrying culture. 
Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to old 
standards of education with even more tenacity than absurdly 
conservative China has done. I am not decrying culture, 
but I am among those who insist that culture may come from 
a study of useful things as well as from a study of useless things; 
that a knowledge of the chemistry of foods may develop a 
girl's mind as much as a knowledge of chemistry that is with- 
out practical use; and that a boy may get about as much cul- 
tural value from the knowledge of a language which does put 
him into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a 
language which might put him into touch with ancient life 
but which he will probably forget as soon as he gets his diploma. 
Slow-moving and tradition-cursed China and Japan, as v/e 
thought them a generation ago, have already committed 
themselves to making education train for actual life. Has 
America given anything more than a half-hearted assent to 
the idea? 

The practical value of this article, I am reminded ]ust here, 
has to do almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to 
remind your member of the legislature of the parallel be- 
tween the wasteful and antiquated money-transfer system 
in China and the equally wasteful and antiquated title-transfer 
system at home; you may wish to inform your member of the 
legislature and your school officials of the advance of practical 
education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind both 
your member of the legislature and your congressman of 
China's successful crusade against the opium evil as an incen- 
tive for more determined American effort against the drink 
evil. Let me conclude this letter, therefore, with two more 
facts with which you may prod your representatives in Wash- 
ington. (Which reminds me to remark, parenthetically, that 
every reform the Chinese are getting to-day comes as a result 
of persistently bringing pressure on their officials; and this 



LIGHT FROM CHINA 101 

parenthetical observation may be as full of suggestion as any 
idea I have elaborated at greater length.) 

The two facts with which you may stir up your servants 
in Washington are just these: 

First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the 
other day I mailed a package by parcels post to another coun- 
try for about half what it would have cost me to mail it from 
one county-seat to another at home. How long are we going 
to be content to let so-called "heathen" countries like China 
have advantages which so-called enlightened, progressive 
America is too slow to adopt? 

Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this 
article one of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells 
me that the average tariff -protected American industry sells 
goods to Asiatic buyers at 30 per cent, less than it will sell to 
the people at home. Thirty per cent., he says, is the usual 
discount for Oriental trade. An electric dynamo which is 
sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for Chinese trade 
at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip have 
men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over 
here, after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we 
Americans can buy them at our own doors. For example, 
a man told me a few weeks ago of buying fleece-lined under- 
wear at half what it costs at home; a missionary tells me that 
he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of Royal baking 
powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats 
are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting 
machinery made in Chicago is carried across land and sea, half- 
way around the world, and sold in far-away Siberia for less 
than the American farmer can buy it at the factory gates. 

And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others 
might be given.' How long the American people are going 
to find it amusing to be held up in such fashion remains to 
be seen. 

Peking, China. 



XI 

THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK 

WITHIN eighteen months China will have a parlia- 
ment or a revolution (she may have both). Such 
at least is the prediction I am wilhng to risk, and 
it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking 
would indorse. 

And the coming of a parliament, popular goverment, to 
guide the destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of 
Heaven has reigned supreme for more than four thousamd 
years — this is only one chapter in the whole marvelous story, 
not of China Awakening, but of China Awake. For the 
breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which 
but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of 
history. "China Breaking Up" was the keynote of every- 
thing written about the Middle Kingdom ten years ago; 
"China Waking Up" has been the keynote of everything treat- 
ing of itj these last five years. 

Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exagger- 
ate when he declares that in a European sense China has made 
greater progress these last ten years than in the preceeding ten 
centuries. The criticism one hears most often now is, not that 
the popular leaders are too conservative, but that they are if, 
anything, too radical; are moving, not too slowly, but too 
rapidly. 

Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn 
what the West has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain 
that a little contact with Europe and America gives a leader 

102 



THE NEW CHINA 108 

undue influence. "Let an official take a trip abroad and for 
six montlis after his return he is the most respected authority 
in the empire." Instead of English missionaries worrying 
over China's slavery to the opium habit, we now have Eng- 
lish officials -embarrassed because China's too rapid breaking 
loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues. 
Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the 
part of the provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others 
to aid Manchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the begin- 
nings of an intense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence. 
Even Confucius no longer looks backward. A young friend 
of mine who is a descendant of the Sage (of the seventy-fifth 
generation) speaks English fluently and is getting a thoroughly 
modern education, while Duke Kung, who inherits the title 
in the Confucian line, is patron of a government school which 
gives especial attention to English and other modern branches 
— by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that the ancient 
examination halls in Peking to which students have come from 
all parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars 
among them rewarded with the highest offices, have now been 
torn down, and where these buildings once stood Chinese 
masons and carpenters are fashioning the building that is to 
house China's first national parliament — unless the parlia- 
ment comes before this building can be made ready. 

And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake 
up in a part of his body only, he wakes up all over. So it 
seems with Cathay. The more serious problem now is not to 
get her moving, but to keep her from moving too rapidly. 
In his Civic Forum address in New York three years ago, Wu 
Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes 
up, she will move like an avalanche." A movement with the 
power of an avalanche needs very careful guidance. 

The one question about which every Chinese reformer's 
heart is now aflame is that of an early parliament. By the 
imperial decree of 1908 a parliament and a constitution were 



104 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

promised within nine years. At that time there was little 
demand for a parliament, but with the organization of the 
Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 the people were given 
an opportunity to confer together and were also given a taste 
of power. For the first time, too, they seem to have realized 
suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact that since 
the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and 
the dismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting 
for the infant Emperor, the Peking government is without a 
strong leader. Consequently the demand for a hastened parlia- 
ment has grown too powerful to be resisted. True, when the 
delegates from all the Provincial Assemblies voiced this demand 
to the Prince Regent last spring his reply was the Edict of 
May 29, declaring that the programme outlined by their late 
Majesties, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, could not 
be changed. Furthermore, the Throne remarked significantly: 
"Let no more petitions or memorials upon this subject be 
presented to Us; Our mind is made up." 

Unfortunately for the peace of the Regent, however, John 
Chinaman is absurdly and obnoxiously persistent on occasion. 
If you will not heed other appeals, he may commit suicide on 
your doorstep, and then you are bewitched for the rest of your 
days, to say nothing of your nights. The talk of an earlier 
parliament would not down even at the bidding of the Dragon 
Throne. Quietly unmanageable delegations waited upon vice- 
roys and compelled these high officials to petition for a 
reopening of the question. Down in Kiang Su a scholar cut 
off his left arm and with the red blood wrote his appeal. In 
Union Medical Hospital, here in Peking, as I write this, a 
group of students are recovering from self-inflicted wounds 
made in the same cause. Going to the Prince Regent's, they 
were told that the Prince could not see them. "Very well," 
they declared, "we shall sit here till he does." At length the 
Prince sent word that, though he could not receive them, he 
would consider their petition, and the students then sliced the 




PU YI, THE SON OF HEAVEN AND EMPEROR OF THE MIDDLE 

KINGDOM 

The baby sovereign of one of the vastest and oldest of empires is shown here in 

the lap of his father, Prince Chun, the Regent 




HOW CHINA IS DEALING WITH OPIUM-INTEMPERANCE 

Burning a pile of pipes of reformed smokers at Hankow. The amazing 
success of Chinas crusade to free her people from the opium curse may be 
justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in history — a chal- 
lenge to our Western world 



THE NEW CHINA 107 

living flesh from their arms and thighs as evidence of their 
earnestness, coloring their petition with their blood. 

At this period of our drama there came upon the stage a 
new actor, at first little heeded, but quickly becoming the 
dominating figure — the Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assem- 
bly. This body, consisting of 100 nobles and men of wealth 
or scholarship appointed by the Throne, and 100 selected 
members of Provincial Assemblies approved by the viceroys, 
was expected to prove a mere echo of the royal wishes. "It 
is evident that the government is to have a docile and sub- 
missive assembly. Mediocrity is the chief characteristic of 
the members chosen." So wrote one of the best informed 
Americans in China, some weeks before it assembled, October 3. 
Renter's press agent in Peking predicted through his papers 
that a few pious resolutions would represent the sum total of 
the Assembly's labors. 

And yet the first day that these two gentlemen went with me 
to look in on the Assembly we found it coolly demanding that 
the Grand Council, or imperial cabinet, be summoned before 
it to explain an alleged breach of the rights of Provincial As- 
semblies ! 

From the very beginning the course of this National Assem- 
bly in steadily gathering unexpected power to itself has re- 
minded me of the old States-General in France in the days 
just before the Revolution, and I could not help looking for 
Danton and Robespierre among the fiery orators in gown and 
queue on this occasion. Significantly, too, I now hear on the 
authority of an eminent scholar that Carlyle's great master- 
piece is the most popular work of historical literature ever 
translated into Chinese. May it teach them some lessons of 
restraint as well as of aggressiveness! 

Be that as it may, the Assembly has proved untamable in 
its demands for an early parliament, not even the hundred 
government members standing up against the imperious pres- 
sure of public opinion. In late October the Assembly unani- 



108 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

raously petitioned the Throne to hasten the programme of 
constitutional government. The day this petition was pre- 
sented it was currently rumored in Peking that unless the 
Prince Regent should yield the people would refuse to pay 
taxes. But he yielded. The trouble now is that he did not 
yield enough to satisfy the public, and there is every indication 
that he will have to yield again, in spite of the alleged unalter- 
ableness of the present plan, which allows a parliament in 
1913 instead of in 1916, as originally promised. A parli- 
ament within eighteen months seems a safe prediction as I 
write this. 

It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parlia- 
ment will be wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practi- 
cally established the rule of the people centuries before any 
European nation adopted the idea. Nominally, the local 
magistrate has had almost arbitrary power, but practically 
the control has been in the hands of the village elders. When 
they have met and decided on a policy, the magistrate has not 
dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, gov- 
ernors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and 
kept in check. Thus centuries of practical seK-government in 
local affairs have given the Chinese excellent preparation for 
the new departure in national affairs. What is proposed is 
not a new power for the people but only an enlargement or 
extension of powers they already exercise. 

Parliamentary government is the one great accomplish- 
ment the Chinese people are now interested in, because they 
propose to make it the tool with which to work out the other 
Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that 
they may set about these tasks inspired by the self-confidence 
begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements of modern 
times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success of 
their anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed. 

Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to 
many provinces, finding in all the same surprising success in 



THE NEW CHINA 109 

enforcing anti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle 
of the Middle Kingdom and a lesson for the world." 

China's next great task is the education of her people, and 
the remedy for pessimism here is to compare her present con- 
dition, not with that of other nations, but with her own con- 
dition ten years ago. A reported school attendance of less 
than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a population of 
400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we compare 
these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years ago 
there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metro- 
politan province of Chihli, for example, I find that there 
are now more teachers in government schools than there were 
pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from 
8000 to 214,637! 

Even if China had not established a single additional school, 
however, or increased the school attendance by even a per- 
centage fraction, her educational progress these last ten years 
would yet be monumental. For as different as the East is 
from the West, so different, in literal fact, are her educational 
ideals at the present time as compared with her educational 
ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of 1905) 
the old exclusively classical and literary system of education 
was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions 
of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting 
the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and 
bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary 
stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement 
would have been hopelessly balked. 

The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of 
history or geography outside of China, nothing of mathematics 
in its higher branches. Its main object was to enable the 
scholar to write a learned essay or a faultless poem, its main 
use to enable him by these means to get office. Under the old 
system the Chinese boy learned a thousand characters before 
he learned their meaning; after this he took up a book con- 



no WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

taining a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the "Tri- 
metrical Classics," consisting of proverbs and historical state- 
ments with each sentence in three characters. Now he is 
taught in much the same way as the Western boy. The old 
training developed the powers of memory; the new training 
the powers of reasoning. The old education enabled the pupil 
to frame exquisite sentences; the new gives him a working 
knowledge of the world. The old looked inward to China and 
backward to her past; the new looks outward to other countries 
and forward to China's future. The old was meant to develop 
a few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citi- 
zens. "Even our students who go abroad," as a Peking official 
said to me, "illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they 
preferred to study law or politics; now they take up engineer- 
ing or mining." 

A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would 
not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under 
which her people labor and must always labor so long as the 
language remains as it is to-day — without an alphabet — 
separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and 
every word in the language. This means an absolute waste 
of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far 
as memorizing the characters counts as memory- training, and 
five years make up the bulk of the average student's school 
days in any country. If it were not for this handicap and the 
serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for present needs, 
it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advance 
of the next twenty years. 

The school and the teacher have always been held in the' 
highest esteem in China. Her only aristocracy has been an 
aristocracy, not of wealth, but of scholarship; her romance has 
been, not that of the poor boy who became rich, but of the poor 
boy who found a way to get an education and became distin- 
guished in public service. Under the old system, if the son 
of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the 



THE NEW CHINA 111 

village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of 
unusual promise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beauti- 
ful to see, would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advance- 
ment. He would be put into long robes and allowed to give 
himself up wholly to learning, while parents, brothers, and 
sisters found inspiration for their own harder labors in the 
thought of the bright future that awaited him. The difficulty 
is that education has been regarded as the privilege of a gifted 
few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship has 
been held in such high favor, however, once let the school 
doors open to everybody and there is little doubt that China 
will eventually acquire the strength more essential than armies 
or battleships: the power which only an educated common 
people can give. 

China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army. 
"Might is right" is the English proverb that I have found more 
often on the tongues of the new school of Chinese than any 
other; and we must confess that other nations seem to have 
tried hard enough to make her accept the principle. In the old 
days there was a saying, " Better have no son than one who is a 
soldier." To-day its new foreign-drilled army of 150,000 to 
200,000 men is the boast of the Middle Kingdom, and the 
army is said to be the most honestly administered department 
of the government. In sharp contrast to the old contempt 
for the soldier, I now find one of the ablest journals in the 
empire (the Shanghai National Review) protesting that interest 
in military training is now becoming too intense: "Scarce a 
school of any pretensions but has its military drill, extending 
in some instances as far as equipment with modern rifles and 
regular range practice, and we regret to notice that some of 
the mission schools have so far forgotten themselves as to 
pander to this militarist spirit." 

It has often been said, of course, that the Chinese will not 
make good soldiers, but whether this has been proved is open 
to question. Certainly, in view of their wretchedly inferior 



112 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

equipment, their failure to distinguish themselves in the war 
with Japan cannot be regarded as conclusive. Take, for ex- 
ample, this description by an eye-witness: 

"Every tenth man [among the Chinese soldiers] had a great silk banner, but 
few were armed with modem weapons. Those who had rifles and modem 
weapons at all had them of all makes; so cartridges of twenty different sorts 
and sizes were huddled together without any attempt at classification, and in 
one open space all sorts were heaped on the ground, and the soldiers were fit- 
ting them to their arms, sometimes trying eight or ten before finding one to fit 
the weapon, throwing the rejected ones back into the heap." 

No sort of efficiency on the part of the rank and file could 
have atoned for such criminal indifiPerence to equipment on 
the part of the officers. It seems to be the opinion of the mili- 
tary authorities with whom I have talked that the Chinese 
army is now better manned than officered. *' Wherever there 
has been a breach of discipline, I have found it the officers' 
fault," an American soldier told me. 

The annexation of Korea, once China's vassal, by Japan, 
and that country's steadily tightening grip on Manchuria 
have doubtless quickened China's desire for military strength. 
Moreover, she wishes to grow strong enough to denounce the 
treaties by which opium is even now forced upon her against 
her will, and by which she is forced to keep her tariff duty on 
foreign goods averaging 5 per cent., alike on luxuries and 
necessities. 

The fifth among China's Herculean labors is the cleansing 
of her Augean stables, and by this I can mean nothing else 
than the abolition of the system of "squeeze," or graft, on 
the part of her officials. In fact, no other reform can be com- 
plete until this is accomplished. The bulk of every officer's 
receipts comes not from his salary, which is as a rule absurdly 
small, but from "squeezes" — fees which every man who has 
dealings with him must pay. In most cases, of course, these 
fees have been determined in a general way by long usage, but 
their acceptance opens the way for innumerable abuses. High 



THE NEW CHINA 113 

offices are auctioned oflf. When I was in Manchuria it was 
currently reported that the Governor of Kirin had paid one 
hundred thousand taels for his office. When I was in New- 
chwang the Viceroy of Manchuria had Just enriched himself 
to the extent of several thousand taels by a visit to that port. 
The men who had had favors from him or had favors to ask 
left "presents" of a rather substantial character when they 
called. I learn from an excellent authority that when an elec- 
tric lighting contract was let for Hankow or its suburbs a 
short time ago the officials provided a squeeze for themselves 
of 10 per cent., but that the Nanking officials, in arranging for 
electric lights there, didn't even seem to care whether the plant 
worked at all or not: they were anxious only to make a contract 
which would net them 35 per cent, of the gross amount! Under 
such circumstances it is not surprising to learn that many an 
office involving the handling of government revenues has its 
price as definitely known as the price of stocks or bonds. 

In private business the Chinese have a reputation for honesty 
which almost any other nation might envy. With their quick- 
ened spirit of patriotism they will doubtless see to it that their 
public business is relieved of the shameless disgrace that the 
" squeeze system " now attaches to it. 

These are some of the big new tasks to which awakened 
China is addressing herself. Of course, the continued develop- 
ment of her railways is no less important than any other matter 
I have mentioned, but railway building cannot be regarded 
as one of China's really new tasks. For years she has been 
alive to the importance of uniting the people of the different 
provinces by means of more railways, more telegraph lines, and 
better postal service. The increase in number of pieces of 
mail handled from 20,000,000 pieces in 1902 to 306,000,000 in 
the last fiscal year bears eloquent testimony alike to the prog- 
ress of the post office and to the growing intelligence of the 
people. By telegraph the people of remotest Cathay now 
make their wishes known to the Son of Heaven and the Tzu- 



114 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

cheng Yuan; it was by telephone that this Tzucheng Yuan, 
or National Assembly, requested the Grand Council of the 
Dragon Empire to appear before it on the day of my first visit. 
The slow and stately camel caravans still come down from 
Mongolia to Peking — I have seen them wind their serpentine 
length through the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they 
have been doing for centuries past — but no longer do they 
bring the latest news from the tribes about Desert Gobi. 
Across 3500 miles of its barren wastes an undaunted tele- 
graph line now "hums the songs of the glad parts of the earth." 

It is no longer worth while to speculate upon the probability 
of a new China; the question now is as to how the new China 
is going to affect the United States and the rest of the world. 
From our Pacific Coast, China is our next-door neighbor, and 
vastly nearer in fact than any map has ever indicated. Even 
New York City is now nearer to Shanghai and Hong Kong, in 
point of ease of access, than she was to Chicago a century ago. 
How Japan's awakening has increased that country's foreign 
trade all the world knows — and China has eight times the 
population of Japan proper, and twenty-eight times the area, 
with almost fabulously valuable natural resources as yet 
untouched! Some one has said that to raise the Chinese 
standard of living to that of our own people would be (from 
the standpoint of markets) equivalent to the creation of four 
Americas. The importance of bringing about closer com- 
mercial relations between the United States and the Middle 
Kingdom can hardly be overestimated. 

It is to be hoped, however, that in our desire to cultivate 
China's friendship we shall not go to the length of changing 
our policy of excluding Asiatic immigration. To the thought- 
ful student it must be plain that in the end such a change 
would lead only to disastrous reaction. At the same time 
we might well effect a change in our methods of enforcing that 
policy. There is nothing else on land or sea that the Celes- 
tial so much dreads as to "lose face," to be humiliated, and it 



THE NEW CHINA llo 

is the humiliation that attaches to the exclusion policy rather 
than the policy itself that is the great stumbling-block in 
the way of thorough cordial relations with America. You 
wouldn't so much object to having the servant at the door 
report his master not at home to visitors, but you would object 
to having the door slammed in your face; and John Chinaman 
is just about as human as the rest of us. Moreover, our own 
friendliness for John should lead us to adopt the more courteous 
of these two methods. Why should not our next exclusion 
law, therefore, be based upon the idea of reciprocity, and 
provide that there shall be admitted into America any year 
only so many Chinese laborers as there were American laborers 
admitted into China the preceding year? 

Finally, it must always be remembered that the awakening 
of China is a matter far more profound than any statistics of 
exports or imports or railway lines or industrial development. 
The Dragon Empire cannot become (as she will) one of the 
mightiest Powers of the earth, her four hundred million people 
cannot be brought (as they will be brought) into the full cur- 
rent of the world's activities, without profoundly influencing 
all future civilization. For its own sake Christendom should 
seize quickly the opportunity offered by the present period 
of flux and change to help mold the new force that it must 
henceforth forever reckon with. "The remedy for the yellow 
peril, whatever that may be," as Mr. Roosevelt said while 
President, "is not the repression of life, but the cultivation 
and direction of life." The school, the mission, the news- 
paper — these are the agencies that should be used. Japan 
has thousands of teachers in China and scores of newspapers, 
but no other nation is adequately active. The present kindly 
feeling for America guarantees an especially cordial recep- 
tion for American teachers, ministers, and writers, and those 
who feel the call to lands other than their own cannot find 
a more promising field than China. 

Peking, China. 



XII 

A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA 

CAN'T get over (and I hope I never shall) my boyish 
interest in the great strange animals that walk along 
behind the steam piano in the circus parades. And the 
animals that I like to see most, I believe, are the elephants 
and the camels. The elephant has about him such quiet, titanic, 
unboasting strength, such ponderous and sleepy-eyed. majesty, 
as to excite my admiration, but the camel has almost an 
equal place in my interest and esteem. 

He is a funny -looking beast, is the camel, and he always re- 
minds me of Henry Gates' story of the very little boy who 
started making a mud man in the spring branch, but before he 
got the second arm on, a storm came up, and when he came 
back his man had mysteriously disappeared. But when Johnny 
went to town next day and for the first time in his life saw a 
one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up, 
he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?'* 

Somehow the camel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks 
to me as if he got away before he was finished. He is either a 
preliminary rough sketch accidentally turned loose on the 
world, or else he got warped somehow in the drying process — 
great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene, goose-necked, saddle- 
backed Old Slow and Steady! 

Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my 
entire tour has given me more pleasure than the sight of the 
camel trains about Peking and all the way to the end of the 
Nankou Pass in the mountains north of the ancient Chinese 

116 





A MAN-MADE DESERT 




PUMPING WATER FOR IRRIGATION 
The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast areas 
that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing Chinese pumping 
water by human treadmill, furnishes another illustration of the Orient's waste 
of labor 




TRANSPORTATION AND 

TRAVEL IN CHINA ^ 

The camels that come 
down from Mongolia and 
wind their unhurried way 
from Chien Men Gate to the 
Gate of the Heavenly Peace 
form one of the most pic- 
turesque of the many 
picturesque sights in fasci- 
nating old Peking. The 
right-hand picture shows the 
author utilizing the most 
r ipid means of transit in the 
mountains north of Peking 



A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA 119 

capital. At the Pass this morniag I saw three such camel 
trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert of Gobi: 
long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as 
if I had become a character in the Arabian Nights or a con- 
temporary of Kublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest 
I have yet seen — twenty -five or thirty camels, I should say, 
treading Indian-file with their usual unostentatious stateliness, 
a wooden pin through each camel's nostrils from which a cord 
bound him to the camel next ahead, a few strangely dressed 
drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession. 

Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered 
by my party, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself, 
as we rode our little donkeys mile after mile of rocky way from 
Nankou village through the Pass. To begin with, we were 
ourselves funny-looking enough, for my donkey was so small 
that he could almost walk under the belly of my saddle-horse at 
home, and my feet almost touched the ground. The donkeys 
ridden by my friends were but little larger, and altogether we 
looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules — an 
effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey 
dropped him twice in the mud! It was our clothing, however, 
our ordinary American and European trousers, coats, overcoats 
and hats, and the fact that we wore no queues down our backs, 
that made us objects of curiosity to the Mongolian and Man- 
churian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders, and mule-pack 
drivers whom we met on the way, just as we were interested in 
the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc., which we found 
them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments. 
These cotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily 
padded bed-quilts ineptly called "comforts," and as the poor 
Chinese in the colder sections of the empire cannot afford 
much fire in winter, they add one layer of cotton padding after 
another until it is difficult for them to waddle along. 

On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey- 
ride over the rough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their 



120 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

very simplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we mee^ 
come from away up in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet 
gone, and the camels and the donkeys (the donkeys in most 
cases larger than those we rode) bring down on their backs the 
Mongolian products — wool, hides, grain, etc. — and carry 
back coal, clothing, and the other simple supplies demanded 
by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack 
trains of donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose, 
each carrying a heavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps 
big, well-packed baskets or goods-boxes carefully balanced. A 
horse over here will tote about as much as a horse at home would 
pull. Then there were several immense droves of sheep: 
in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, and every 
sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the general 
effect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The 
Chinese raise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too, 
and drive them to market loose in the same way that they 
drive their sheep. We also met two or three droves of mountain 
horses, a hundred or more to the drove. 

But it would have been well worth while to make the trip 
if we had gotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great 
Wall at the end of the journey. About two thousand miles 
of stone and brick, twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough 
on top for two carriages to drive abreast, this great structure, 
begun two thousand years ago to keep the wild barbarian 
Northern tribes out of China, is truly "the largest building on 
earth," and one of the world's greatest wonders. It would 
be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but where 
we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after 
another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy, 
stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and 
thousands of tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the 
sheer steep mountainsides is a question that must excite 
every traveller's wonder. Certainly no one who has walked 
on top of the great wall, climbing among the clouds from one 



A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA 121 

misty eminence to another, as we did to-day, can ever forget 
the experience. 

Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not 
clear. The mists that hung about the mountain-peaks below 
and around us; the roaring wind that shepherded the clouds, 
now driving them swiftly before it and leaving in clear view 
for a minute peak after peak and valley after valley, the next 
minute brushing great fog-masses over wall and landscape 
and concealing all from view — all this lent an element of mys- 
tery and majesty to the experience not out of keeping with our 
thought of the long centuries through which this strange guard 
has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long 
dead and crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era be- 
gan, were the hands that fashioned these earlier brick and laid 
them in the mortar, and for many generations thereafter watch- 
men armed with bows and arrows rode along the battlements 
and towers, straining their eyes for sight of whatever enemy 
might be bold enough to try to cross the mighty barrier. 

However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we 
cannot but admire the almost matchless daring of the concep- 
tion and the almost unparalleled industry of the execution. 
Beside it the digging of our Panama Canal with modern ma- 
chinery, engines, steam power and electricity, considered simply 
as a feat of Herculean labor, is no longer a subject for boasting. 
To my mind, the very fact that the Chinese people had the 
courage to conceive and attempt so colossal an enterprise is 
proof enough of genuine greatness. No feeble folk could even 
have planned such an undertaking. 

On this trip into the heart of China, however, I have noticed 
a number of things of decidedly practical value in addition 
to the merely curious things I have just reported. In the first 
place, I have been simply amazed to find that these Chinese 
farmers around Peking, Nankou, and Tien-tsin are far ahead 
of some of our farmers in the matter of horsepower help in 
plowing. 



122 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Coming up from Peking to Nankou, I found farmers in al- 
most every field busy with their fall plowing or late grain sowing, 
and while there were dozens and dozens of three-horsepower 
plows, I saw only one or two one-horsepower plows on the 
whole trip. This is all the more surprising in view of the fact 
that labor is so cheap over here — 15 cents a day American 
money would be a good wage for farm hands — but evidently 
the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, they 
must have two or three horses in order to get the best results 
from the soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in 
good condition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys 
(they use large donkeys for plowing, even if small ones for 
riding) they get the land in good condition in spite of the fact 
that they cannot get the good plows that any American farmer 
may buy. I rode donkey -back through some farming country 
yesterday and watched the work rather closely. The plows, 
like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are much better 
in workmanship. Here they are made by the village carpen- 
ter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, and 
below it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point. 

The Chinese farmers, it should also be observed in passing, 
fully realize the importance of land rolling and harrowing. 
It is no uncommon sight to see a man driving a three-horse 
harrow. It is also said that for hundreds of years the Chinese 
have practised a suitable rotation of crops and have known the 
value of leguminous plants. 

Nankou Pass, China. 



XIII 

FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 

SHALL have to go back to Peking some time. You must 
hurry out of the city, men tell you there, or else ere you 
know it the siren-like Lure of the East will grip you 
irresistibly; and I felt in some measure the soundness of 
the counsel. The knowledge that each day the long trains of 
awkward-moving camels are winding their unhurried way from 
Chien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow- 
tiled roofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them, 
while to the left are the faint gray -blue outlines of the Western 
Hills — all this will be to me a silent but perpetual invitation 
to go back. 

The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never- 
failing interest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese 
men in gowns and queues (the wives wear the trousers over 
here!), the nobles and officers in gorgeous silks and velvets; 
the fantastic head-dress of the Manchu ladies, and the hobbling 
movements of the Chinese women hampered by ruined feet; 
the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring, pig-taUed coolies 
in the shafts; the heavy two- wheeled Peking carts like half- 
sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreign or 
native woman glimpsed through the glass windows of her sedan 
chair, eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human 
burden; the long lines of shop fronts with such a pleasing 
variety of decorative color as to make one wonder why artists 
have not made them famous; the uniformed soldiers from 
every nation on the earth to guard the various legations, and 

123 



124 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreign clothing. The 
strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memory ever 
after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, the jing- 
ling bells of the thousands of sturdy little saddle donkeys, the 
rattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging 
gong of a mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and 
behind to bear testimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of 
peddlers of many kinds, their wares balanced in baskets borne 
from their shoulders. 

Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some 
man has died and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper- 
covered horse in the belief that it will be changed into a real 
horse to serve him in the Beyond; and imitations of other 
things that might be useful to him are burned in the same way. 

Or perhaps a marriage procession may pass. A dozen servants 
carry placards with emblems of the rank of the family repre- 
sented by the bride or groom, numerous other servants bear 
presents, and the bride herself passes by concealed in a gor- 
geous sedan chair borne on the shoulders of six or eight coolies. 

Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however, 
Peking is even richer in historic interest. And by historic in 
China is not meant any matter of the last half -hour, such as 
Columbus's discovery of America or the landing at Plymouth 
Rock; these things to the Chinaman are so modern as to belong 
rather in the category of recent daily newspaper sensations 
along with the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy or the Thaw 
trial. If he wishes something genuinely historic, he goes 
back three or four thousand years. For example, a friend of 
mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time 
ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country. 
Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom. 
"Yes," he answered, "that is our custom now, since we changed. 
But it has not always been so. We did the other way up to 
four or five centuries before Christ." Whereupon the audience, 
amaze4 at the utterly casual mention of an event two thousand 



FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 125 

years old as if it were a happening of yesterday, was convulsed 
in merriment, which the young Chinaman was entirely unable 
to understand. 

When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then 
bearing another name), having centuries before grown into 
eminence, had been destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering 
upon its second youth. About the time of the last Caesars it 
fell into the hands of the Tartars, who gave place to the Mongols 
after 1215. It was during the reign of the Mongol Emperor, 
Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital, then called 
Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered 
America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nan- 
kou, built the great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to 
this day — forty feet high, wide enough on top for four or 
five carriages to drive abreast, and thirteen miles around. 

Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have 
most often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only 
ten years and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. 
The widely current idea is that this Boxer movement originated 
in anti-missionary sentiment, but this is not borne out by the 
facts. The late Col. Charles Denby, long American Minister 
to China, pointed out very clearly that the main cause was 
opposition to the land-grabbing policies of European nations. 
Once started, however, it took the form of opposition to every- 
thing foreign — missionaries and non-missionaries alike. I 
passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in 
company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the 
siege that sounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs; 
stories of Chinese Christian converts butchered like sheep 
by their infuriated fellow countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in 
another part of the city, was finally rescued by foreign troops, 
the surviving Christians and missionaries were dying of star- 
vation; they had become mere wan, half -crazed skeletons, 
subsisting on roots and bark. 

The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts 



126 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of 
the church, but of mankind; for what mart of us is not inspired 
to worthier things by every high deed of martyrdom which a 
fellowman anywhere has suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers 
hurled arrow after arrow with letters attached oflPering immu- 
nity to the Chinese converts if they would abandon their Chris- 
tian leaders, but«not even starvation led one to desert. Colonel 
Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000 Chinese 
Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them 
abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day 
of one family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked 
out by suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying 
their Master, and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, 
"Jesus Is Leading Me." At Taiyan-fu an especially touching 
incident occurred : Five or six young girls, just in their teens, 
were about to be killed, when a leader intervened, declaring: 
"It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and urged them to 
recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since that 
is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for 
their faith with their lives. 

I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means 
river in Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the 
famous Chinese industrial centre, about 600 miles south of 
Peking. About Hankow I found farming much more primi- 
tive than that around Peking, Nankou, and Tientsin. Instead 
of the three and four horse plows I found in North China, 
the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox. 
The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of 
buying a "farm"; he buys a "field." In Kwang-tung there is 
a saying that one sixth of an acre "will support one mouth." 
As nearly as I can find out, the average wages paid farm labor- 
ers is about 10 cents (gold) a day. The average for all kinds 
of labor, a member of the Emperor's Grand Council tells me, 
is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18 cents gold a day. 

In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in 



FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 127 

China or Japan there are three or four things that must always 
be kept in mind. One is that there are no fences between 
fields; I haven't seen a wooden or wire farm -fence since I left 
America. A high row or ridge separates one field from another, 
and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm- 
^ houses. The people live in villages, from ten to fifty farmhouses 
grouped together, and the laborers go out from their homes to 
the fields each morning and return at evening. The same sys- 
tem, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as popula- 
tion becomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we 
shall doubtless attempt to group our farm homes also. Even 
now, much more — vastly more — might be done in this re- 
spect if our farmers only had the plan in mind in building new 
homes. Where three or four farms come near together, why 
should not the dwellings be grouped near a common centre.'' 
It would mean much for convenience and for a better social life. 
Another notable difference from our own country is the 
absence of wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any 
kind. In this part of China the farmhouse is made of mud 
bricks, or mud and reeds, or else of a mixture of mud and stone, 
and is usually surrounded by a high wall of the same material. 

Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are bask- 
ing in the joyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights 
they may reflect that the Chinaman on this side of the earth 
enjoys no such comfort. Enough fire to cook the scanty meals 
is all that he can afford. To protect themselves against cold, 
as I have already pointed out, the poor put on many thicknesses 
of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wear furs and woolens. 
When a coolie has donned the maximum quantity of cotton 
padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-plated 
cruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him. 

At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plow- 
ing and harrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out 
to the Temple of Agriculture, where each spring the Emperor 
or Prince Regent comes and plows sixteen rows, the purpose 



128 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

being to bear testimony to the high honorableness of agricul- 
ture aifd its fundamental importance to the empire. This 
happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it is in late fall 
that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy now flailing 
grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, or grind- 
ing it in mills operated by a single donkey. 

In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions 
— possibly bUlions — of the Chinese dead are even more 
in evidence than in the northern provinces. Let China last 
a few more thousand years with its present customs and the 
country will be one vast cemetery, and the people will have to 
move away to find land to cultivate. As not one grave in a 
thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem as 
if they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that each 
Chinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The 
care of their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even 
when John goes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be 
used to bring his body back to the ancestral burying ground. 

In a land so given over to superstition I have no doubt 
that the most horrible disasters would also be expected 
as the penalty for interfering with any grave. It seems odd 
that a people who had a literature centuries before our Anglo- 
Saxon ancestors emerged from barbarism should now be the 
victims of superstitions almost as gross as those prevailing in 
Africa; but such are the facts. Chang Chih-tung, who died a 
few months ago, was one of the most progressive and en- 
lightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but not 
even a man of his type could free himself from the great body 
of superstition handed down from generation to generation. 

In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as 
"Dragon Hill," because of the Chinese belief that a dragon in- 
habits it. This long hill divides the city into two parts; every 
day hundreds and sometimes possibly thousands of people 
must climb up one side and down the other in getting from one 
part of the town to another. Therefore, when Chang Chih- 



FROM PEEING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 129 

tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that he would make a 
cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble. And he 
did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a pain- 
ful abscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he con- 
sulted were quick in pointing out the trouble. By making 
the cut in the hill, they told him, he had offended the earth 
dragon which inhabits it, and unless the cut were filled up Chang 
might die and disaster might come upon the city. Of course, 
there was nothing for him to do but to restore the ancient 
obstruction to travel, and so it remains to this day. 

In sight from Dragon Hill is another hill known as Tortoise 
Hill, supposed to be inhabited by a tortoise spirit or devil, and 
at its foot are some lakes in which it has long been said that the 
tortoise washes its feet. Now these lakes are on property 
owned by the Hanyang Steel & Iron Works and they decided 
a few years ago that they would either drain off the water or 
else fill up the lakes so as to get more land. But before they 
got started the Chinese civil authorities heard of it and notified 
the Hanyang Company that such a proceeding could not be 
tolerated. The tortoise would have nowhere to wash his 
feet, and would straightway bring down the wrath of Heaven 
on all the community! 

It is from superstitions such as these that the schools must 
free the Chinese before the way can be really cleared for the 
introduction of Christianity. The teacher is as necessary as 
the preacher. And the task of getting the masses even to the 
point where they can read and write is supremely difficult. 
The language, it must be remembered, has no alphabet. 
Each word is made not by joining several letters together, 
as with us, but by making a distinct character — each char- 
acter an intricate and difficult combination of lines, marks, and 
dots. Or perhaps the word may be formed by joining two dis- 
tinct characters together. For example, to write "obedience" 
in Chinese you write together the characters for "leaf" and 
"river," the significance being that true obedience is as trusting 



130 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

and unresisting as the fallen leaf on the river's current. My 
point is, however, that for each word a distinct group of marks 
(like mixed-up chicken tracks) must be piled together, and the 
task of remembering how to recognize and write the five thou- 
sand or more characters in the language would make an average 
American boy turn gray at the very thought. My friend 
Doctor Tenney, of the American Legation in Peking, asserts 
that at least five years of the average Chinese pupil's school 
life might be saved if the language were based on an alphabet 
like ours instead of on such arbitrary word-signs. 

There is one thing that must be said in favor of the Chinese 
system of education, however, and that is the emphasis it has 
always laid on moral or ethical training. The teaching, too, 
seems to have been remarkably effective. Take so basic a 
matter as paying one's debts, for example: it is a part of the 
Chinaman's religion to get even with the world on every Chinese 
New Year, which comes in February. If he fails to "square 
up" at this time he "loses face," as his expressive phrase has 
it. He is a bad citizen and unpopular. Consequently all 
sorts of things may be bought cheaper just before the New 
Year than any other time. Every man is willing to make any 
reasonable sacrifice, selling his possessions at a great discount 
if necessary, rather than have a debt against him run over 
into the new period — an excellent idea for America ! 

I do not know whether Confucianism is responsible for this 
particular policy, but at any rate the fact remains that outside 
the Bible the world has never known a more sublime moral 
philosophy than that of Confucius. It means much, therefore, 
that every Chinese pupil must know the maxims and principles 
of the great sage by heart. Moreover, as Confucius did not 
profess to teach spiritual truth, the missionaries in China are 
fast coming to realize that it is both unnecessary and foolish 
to urge the people to abandon Confucianism. The proper 
policy is to tell the Chinese, "Hold on to all that is good and 
true in Confucius. There is very little in his teachings that is 



FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG 131 

in conflict with religion, and Christian leaders now recognize 
him as one of the greatest moral forces the world has known. 
But to the high moral teaching of the Chinese master you must 
add now the moral teachings of Christianity and, more essen- 
tial still, the great body of spiritual truth which Confucianism 
lacks." The grand old man among Chinese missionaries. 
Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who has been in the work since 1850, 
said to me in Peking, "Some of the best Christians are now 
the best Confucianists." 

Confucianism, as any one can see by reading the books, is 
no more a substitute for Christianity than Proverbs is for St. 
John's Gospel. As Doctor Brewster, another missionary, says, 
"We do not ask an American scholar to renounce Plato to 
become a Christian; why should we ask a Chinaman to re- 
nounce Confucius.''" 

Confucius lived five centuries before Christ, and at his 
old home in Shantung are the graves alike of his descendants 
and his ancestors — the oldest family burying ground in the 
world. "No monarch on earth can trace back his lineage by 
an unbroken chain through .so many centuries." In Peking 
I was so fortunate as to form a friendship with a descendant of 
Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation — Mr. Kung Hsiang 
Koh — a promising and gifted senior in the Imperial College 
of Languages. At my request he inscribed a scroll for me in 
beautiful Chinese characters, representing one of my favorite 
quotations from his world-famous ancestor. I give an English 
translation herewith: 

"Szema-New asked about the Superior Man. The Master said, 'The su- 
perior man is without anxiety or fear.' 

" 'Being without anxiety or fear,' said New, 'does this constitute what we 
should call the superior man?' 

"The Master replied, 'When a man looks inward and finds no guilt there, 
why shoiild he grieve? or what should he fear?"* 

On board S. S. Kutwo, 

Yangtze River, China. 




XIV 

SIDELIGHTS ON CHINESE CHARACTER 
AND INDUSTRY 

AVING mentioned some of the good points of John 
Chinaman (and he has many excellent points), it 
is also necessary to point out some of his short- 
comings. The trouble with John is that he had 
some tiptop ancestors, but he fell into the habit of looking 
backward at them so continuously that he has failed, in recent 
centuries, to make any further progress. He had a civiliza- 
tion and a literature when our white ancestors were wearing 
skins; but there he stopped, so that we have not only caught 
up with him, but have passed him almost immeasurably. 
The result is that now China is waking up to find that a great 
number of ancient abuses, both in public and private life, 
must be sloughed off if she is to become a genuinely healthy 
modern nation. 

Of what has been accomplished with reference to opium 
I have already written at length. But this is only a beginning. 
With the opium evil under foot, China will still have other 
dragons to slay — if I may use the term dragon in an evil 
sense in a country whose national emblem is the dragon. For 
one thing, slavery still exists in China. A friend of mine in 
Peking told me of an acquaintance, an educated Chinaman, 
who bought a young girl two years ago for two hundred taels 
(about $120 gold), and says now he would not take one thousand 
two hundred (about $720 gold). Already, however, a vigor- 
ous sentiment for the complete abolition of slavery has devel- 

132 



CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 133 

oped over the empire. About six months ago an imperial 
edict was issued prohibiting slave trading, decreeing that 
child-slaves should become free on reaching the age of twenty- 
five, and opening ways for older slaves to buy their freedom. 
The peons or slaves of the Manchu princes were, however, 
excepted from the terms of this edict. 

Foot-binding also continues a grievous and widespread evil. 
Formerly every respectable Chinese father bound the feet of 
all his girls. Fathers who did not were either degraded men, 
reckless of public opinion, or so bitterly poor as to require 
the services of their daughters in unremitting manual labor. 
Consequently, a natural foot on a woman became a badge of 
social inferiority: a Chinaman of prominence wouldn't marry 
her. Now, however, many of the wealthier upper-class China- 
men in the cities are letting their girls grow up with unbound 
feet, and this custom will gradually spread until the middle 
and lower classes generally, seeing that fashion no longer decrees 
such a barbaric practice, will also abandon it. 

The progress of the reform, however, is by no means so rapid 
as could be wished. A father with wealth may risk getting a 
husband for his daughter even though she has natural feet, but 
ambitious fathers among the common people fear to take such 
risks. An American lady whose home I visited has a servant 
who asked for two or three weeks' leave of absence last summer, 
explaining that he wished to bind the feet of his baby daughter. 
My friend, knowing all the cruelty of the practice, and having 
a heart touched by memories of the heart-rending cries with 
which the poor little creatures protest for weeks against their 
suffering, pleaded with the servant to let the child's feet alone. 
But to no effect. "Big feet no b'long pretty," he said, and 
went home unconvinced. 

"The feet," according to the brief statement of ex-Minister 
Charles Denby, "are bandaged at an age varying from three to 
five years. The toes are bent back until they penetrate the 
sole of the foot, and are tightly bound in that position. The 



134. WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

parts fester and the toes grow into the foot." The result is 
that women grow up with feet the same size as when they were 
children, and the flesh withers away on the feet and below the 
knees. Throughout life the fashion-cursed girl and woman 
must hobble around on mere stumps. When you first see a 
Chinese woman with bound feet you are reminded of the old 
pictures of Pan, the imaginary Greek god with the body of a 
man and the feet of a goat. The resemblance to goat's feet 
is remarkably striking. As the women are unable to take 
proper exercise — except with great pain — there is little 
doubt that their physical strength has been seriously im- 
paired by this custom, and that the stamina of the whole race 
as well has suffered in consequence. 

Whenever a foreigner — it is the white man who is "the for- 
eigner" over here — begins a comparison or contract between 
the Chinese and the Japanese, he is sure to mention among the 
first two or three things the vast difference in moral standards 
with regard to family life. The cleanness of the family life 
in China, he will tell you, is one of the great moral assets of 
the race, while the contrary conditions largely prevailing in 
Japan would seem to threaten ultimate disaster to the people. 

As in most Asiatic countries, however, there is in China no 
very definite moral sentiment against a man's marrying more 
than one wife. In fact, it is regarded not as a question of morals 
but of expense. It is one of the privileges of the Chinaman 
who can afford it, and the No. 1 wife is often glad for her hus- 
band to take a No. 2 and a No. 3 wife, because the secondary 
wives are somewhat under her authority and relieve her of 
much work and worry. A few months ago a Chinaman in 
Hankow had a very capable No. 2 wife who was about to quit 
him to work for some missionaries, whereupon Wife No. 1, 
Wife No. 3, and the much-worried husband all joined in a 
protest against the household's losing so capable a woman. 

All these three wives were in subjection to the husband's 
mother, however, until the old lady took cholera last year, and 



CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 1S5 

in a day or so was dead. The prevalence of awful scourges, 
such as cholera and bubonic plague, is another evil which the 
new China must conquer. These diseases are due mainly, 
of course, to unsanitary ways of living, and when you have 
been through a typical Chinese city you wonder that anybody 
escapes. The streets are so narrow that with outstretched 
arms you can almost reach from side to side, and the unmen- 
tionable foulness of them often smells to heaven. 

Moreover, if you have the idea that the typical Chinaman 
is content to live only on rice, prepare to abandon it. Hogs 
are more common in a village of Chinamen than dogs in a 
village of negroes; and, in some cases, almost equally at home 
in the houses. I saw a Chinese woman in Kiukiang feeding 
a fat porker in the front room, while, in the narrow streets 
around, hogs and dogs were wandering together or lying con- 
tentedly asleep in the sunshine by the canal bank. In fact, 
the ancient Chinese character for "home" is composed of two 
characters — "pig" and "shelter" — a home being thus rep- 
resented as a pig under a shelter! 

Small wonder that cholera is frequent, smallpox a scourge, 
and leprosy in evidence here and there. Quite recently a 
couple of mission teachers of my denomination have died of 
smallpox: they "didn't believe in vaccination." Shanghai, 
as I write this, is just recovering from a bubonic plague scare. 
There were one or two deaths from the plague among the 
Chinese, whereupon the foreigners put into force such drastic 
quarantine regulations that the Chinese rebelled with riots. 
The whites then put their cannon into position, the volunteer 
soldiers were called out, and it looked at one time as if I should 
find the city in a state of bloody civil war, but fortunately the 
trouble seems now to have blown over. 

Unfortunately the ignorant Chinese put a great deal more 
faith in patent medicines and patent medicine fakirs than 
they do in approved sanitary measures. It is interesting to 
find that American patent medicines discredited at home by 



136 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

the growing intelligence of our people have now taken refuge 
in the Orient, and are coining the poor Chinaman's ignorance 
into substantial shekels. Worst of all, some of the rehgious 
papers over here are helping them to delude the unintelligent, 
just as too many of our church papers at home are doing. 

In Shanghai I picked up a weekly publication printed in 
Chinese and issued by the Christian Literature Society, and 
asked what was the advertisement on the back. "Dr. Wil- 
liams's Pink Pills for Pale People," was the answer. 

One of the most pecuhar things about China is the exist- 
ence of almost unlimited official corruption side by side with 
high standards of honesty and morahty in ordinary business or 
private life. I have already referred to the system of " squeeze" 
or graft by which almost every official gets the bulk of his 
earnings. In Shanghai it is said that the Taotai, or chief official 
there, paid $50,000 (gold) for an office for which the salary is 
only $1500 (gold) a year. 

Against this concrete evidence of official corruption place 
this evidence of a high sense of honor in private life. A young 
Chinaman, employed in a position of trust in Hankow, em- 
bezzled some money. The company, knowing that his family 
was one of some standing, notffied the father. He and his sons, 
brothers of the thief, went after the young fellow and killed 
him with an ax. The community as a whole approved the 
action, because in no other way could the father free his family 
from the disgrace and ostracism it would have incurred by 
having an embezzler in it. 

The Yangtze River trip from Hankow to Shanghai, men- 
tioned in my last letter, I found very interesting. W^e were 
three days going the 600 miles. The Yangtze is the third 
largest river in the world and navigable 400 miles beyond 
Hankow, or 1000 miles in all. It would be navigable much 
farther but for a series of waterfalls. Nearly thirty miles 
wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean's 
blue forty miles out in the Pacffic, I am told. In fact, I think 



;3 . % d>^ 




FASHIONABLE CHINESE DINNER PARTY 




HOW LUMBER IS SAWED IN THE ORIENT — THERE ARE PRACTI- 
CALLY NO SAW MILLS 



R. 



^ n o 




/?- 



^ 






7^ 



?:?* 








A QUOTATION FROM CONFUCIUS 

This is the upper part of a scroll kindly written for the author by Mr. Kung 
Ilsiang Koh (or Alfred E. Kung as he signs himself in English). Mr Kung is 
a descendant of Confucius (Kung Fut-zu) of the seventy-fifth generation, and the 
complete quotation of which the scroll is a reproduction in Chinese characters 
reads as follows' 

"Ssu-ma Niu asked for a definition of the princely man. 

"The Master said: 'The princely man is one who knows neither grief nor 
fear.' 'Absence of grief and fear?' said Niu, 'Is this the mark of a princely man?' 
The Master said, 'If a man look into his heart and find no guilt there, why should 
he grieve? Or of what should he be afraid?' " 



CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 139 

it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgid 
stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow 
the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, 
when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor 
boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were the waves, but a rather 
rickety looking little native canoe called a "sampan," with 
tattered sails, bobbing up and down like a cork, finally landed 
me safely across the three or four miles of sea-like waves. All 
the way from Hankow to Peking one encounters all sorts of 
Chinese junks and other odd river-craft. In many cases they 
look like the primitive Greek and Roman boats of which one 
sees pictures in the ancient histories. The Chinese are excel- 
lent sailors and manage their boats very skilfully. The great- 
est canal that the world knows was begun by them in the time 
of Nebuchadnezzar and finished thirteen centuries ago. 

Until very recently, however, the Chinese have not wanted 
railways. Coming from Hankow to Shanghai I passed in 
sight of the site of the old Woosung-Shanghai Railway, the 
first one built in China; but before it got well started the 
people tore it up and threw it into the river. 

In Shanghai I met his Excellency Wu Ting Fang, formerly 
Minister to the United States, and he told me of his troubles 
in building, under Li Hung Chang's directions, what turned 
out to be the first permanent railway in China. This was less 
than twenty-five years ago. Li Hung Chang said to Mr. 
Wu: "If we ask the authorities to let us build a railway, 
they'll refuse, so I am going to take the responsibility myself. 
The only way to overcome the prejudice against railways is 
to let the people see that a railroad isn't the evil they think 
it is." Accordingly, Mr. Wu set to wort on the Tongshan 
Railway. He built first ten miles, then twenty more. Then 
as the road was working well, and its usefulness demonstrated, 
he and Li Hung Chang thought they might get permission from 
the Throne to construct a line from Tientsin to Peking. Suc- 
cessful in this effort, they went ahead with the survey and im- 



140 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAEJNG UP 

ported from America the materials for building the line — 
and then came a new edict forbidding them to proceed! The 
matter had been taken up by the viceroys and governors, and 
80 per cent, of them had opposed building the line! 

Now, less than twenty-five years later, John Chinaman is 
calling for railroads in almost every non-railroad section, and 
the railroads already built are paying handsome dividends. 
Everybody seems to travel. Besides the first-class and sec- 
ond-class coaches, most trains carry box-cars, very much like 
cattle-cars and without seats of any kind, for third-class pas- 
sengers. And I don't recall having seen one yet that wasn't 
chock full of Chinamen, happy as a similar group of Americans 
would be in new automobiles. A missionary along the fine 
between Hankow and Peking says that he now makes a 200- 
mile trip in five hours which formerly took him nineteen days. 
Before the railway came he had to go by wheelbarrow, ten 
miles a day, his luggage on one side the wheel, and himself on 
the other. Thousands of these wheelbarrows, doing freight 
and passenger business, are in use in Shanghai and the regions 
roundabout. A frame about three feet wide and four feet 
long is built over and around the wheel, and a coolie will 
carry as much as half a ton on one of them. 

Along the Yangtze a considerable quantity of cotton is 
grown, and I went out into some of the fields in the neighbor- 
hood of Shanghai. The stalks were dead, of course, and in 
some cases women were pulling them up for fuel, but I could 
see that the Chinese is a poorer variety than our American 
cotton, and is cultivated more poorly. Instead of planting in 
rows as we do, the peasants about Shanghai broadcast in 
"lands" eight or ten feet wide, as we sow wheat and oats. 
About Shanghai they do not use the heavier two and three 
horse plows I found about Peking; consequently the land is 
poorly broken to begin with, and the cultivation while the crop 
is growing amounts to very little. No sort of seed selection or 
variety breeding has ever* been attempted. No wonder that 



CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY 141 

the stalks are small, the bolls small and few in number, and 
the staple also very short. 

From my observation I should say that with better va= 
rieties and better cultivation CJiina could easily double her 
yields without increasing her acreage. There is likely to be 
some increase in acreage, too, however, because farmers who 
have had to give up poppy culture are in search of a new 
money crop, and in most cases will take up cotton. 

As I have said before, the coolie class wear padded clothes 
all winter, and as they have no fire in their houses, they natur- 
ally have to wear several suits even of the padded sort. I 
remember a speech Congressman Richmond P. Hobson made 
several years ago in which he spoke of having seen Chinamen 
with clothes piled on, one suit on top of another, until they 
looked like walking cotton bales. Some of his hearers may 
have thought this an exaggeration, but if so, I wish to give 
him the support of my own observation and that of a 
preacher. As a Chinaman came in the street-car in Shanghai 
Friday my missionary host remarked: "That fellow has on 
four or five suits already, and he'll put on more as the 
weather gets colder." 

Mr. Currie, the English superintendent of the International 
Cotton Mills at Shanghai, told me as I went through his factory 
that the Chinese men and women he employs average about 
12 cents a day (American money), but that from his experi- 
ence in England he would say that English labor at 80 
cents or a dollar a day is cheaper. "You'd have more for 
your money at the week's end. One white girl will look after 
four sides of a ring spinning frame; it takes six Chinese, as you 
see. Then, again, the one white girl would oil her own machine; 
the Chinese will not. In the third place, in England two over- 
seers would be enough for this room, while here we must have 
seven." 

Hong Kong. 



XV 



FAREWELL TO CHINA 

WITH this letter we bid farew*ell to China. When I 
see it again it wUl doubtless be greatly changed. 
Already I have come too late to see poppy fields 
or opium dens; too late to see the old-time cells 
in which candidates for office were kept during their exami- 
nation periods; too late, I am told, to find the flesh of cats or 
dogs for sale in the markets. If I had waited five years longer, 
it is likely that I should not have found the men wearing their 
picturesque queues and half -shaven heads; before five years, 
too, a parliament and a cabinet wUl have a voice in the gov- 
ernment in which untU now the one potent voice has been 
that of the Emperor, the "Son of Heaven" divinely appointed 
to rule over the Middle Kingdom. All over the country the 
people are athrUl with a new life. Unless present signs fail, the 
century will not be old before the Dragon Empire, instead of 
being a country hardly consulted by the Powers about matters 
affecting its own interests, will itself become one of the Powers 
and will have to be consulted about affairs in other nations. 
Be it said, to begin with, that I am just back from Canton, 
the most populous city in China and supposedly one of the 
half dozen most populous in the whole world. As no census 
has ever been taken, it is impossible to say how many people 
it really does contain. The estimates vary all the way from 
a million and a half to three millions. Half a million people, 
it is said, live on boats in the river. Some of them are born, 
marry, grow old, and die without ever having known a home 

142 



FAREWELL TO CHINA 143 

on land. And these boats, it should be remembered, are no 
larger than a small bedroom at home. I saw many of them 
yesterday afternoon, and I also saw many of the women 
managing them. The women boatmen — or boat-women — 
of Canton are famous. 

Think of a city of two or three million people without a 
vehicle of any kind — wagon, buggy, carriage, street-car, 
automobile, or even a rickshaw! And yet this is what Canton 
appears to be. I didn't see even a wheelbarrow. The streets 
are too narrow for any travel except that of pedestrians, and 
the only men not walking are those borne on the shoulders 
of men who are walking. My guide (who rejoices in the 
name of Ah Cum John) and I went through in sedan chairs — 
a sort of chair with light, narrow shafts before and behind. 
These shafts fit over the heads and bare shoulders of three 
coolies, or Chinese laborers, and it is these human burden- 
bearers who showed us the sights of Canton. 

To get an idea of what the city is like, fancy an area of about 
thirty square miles crowded with houses as thick as they can 
stand, every house jam up against its neighbors, with only 
walls between — no room for yards or parks or driveways — 
and these houses dense with people! Then punch into these 
square miles of houses a thousand winding alleys, no one wide 
enough to be called a street, and fill up these alleys also 
with hurrying, perspiring, pig-tailed Chinamen. There are no 
stores, shops or offices such as would look familiar to an Amer- 
ican, but countless thousands of Chinese shops wide open to 
the streets, with practically no doors in evidence. 

Such is Canton: a human hive of industry: a maze of laby- 
rinthine alleys crowded with people, the alleys or streets too 
narrow to get the full light of day! 

Outside this crowded city of Canton's living masses is the 
even larger and more crowded city of Canton's dead. From 
the highest point on the city wall my guide pointed out an 
unbroken cemetery extending for ten miles: the hills dotted 



144 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

with mounds until they have the appearance of faces pitted 
by smallpox. 

For the Chinaman, however unimportant in actual life, be- 
comes a man of importance as soon as he dies, and his grave 
must be carefully looked after. The finest place I saw in 
Canton was the mortuary where the dead bodies of wealthy 
Chinamen are kept until burial. The handsome coffins I 
saw ranged in value from $1400 to $2700 Mexican, or half 
these amounts American money. The lacquered surfacing ac- 
counts for the high cost. 

Nor are these departed Celestials kept here for a few days 
only. Sometimes it is a matter of several years, my guide 
told me, the geomancers or fortune-tellers being employed all 
this time in finding a suitable site for a grave. These miser- 
able scoundrels pretend that the soul of the dead man will not 
rest unless he is buried in just the right spot and in just the 
right kind of soil. Perhaps no professional man in China earns 
as much as these fakirs. Sometimes it happens that after a 
man has been dead two or three years his family suffers a series 
of misfortunes. A frequent explanation in such cases is that 
the wrong site has been chosen for the dead man's burial place. 
Another geomancer is then hired and told to find a new grave 
where the soul will rest in peace. Of course, he charges a 
heavy fee. 

In one $1400 coffin I saw was the body of a wealthy young 
Chinaman who died last spring. Three times a day a new cup 
of tea is placed on the table for his spirit, and on the walls of 
the room were scores of silk scrolls, fifteen feet long, express- 
ing the sympathy of friends and relatives. Around the coffin, 
too, were almost life-size images of servants, and above it a 
heap of gilded paper to represent gold. When the geomancers 
finally find a suitable grave for the poor fellow he will be buried, 
and these paper servants and this paper gold will be burned, in 
the belief that they will be converted into real servants and 
real gold for his use in the spirit world. 



FAREWELL TO CHINA 145 

A friend of mine in Peking who saw the funeral of the late 
Emperor and Empress Dowager told me some interesting 
stories of the truly Oriental ceremonies then celebrated. Tons 
of clothes and furs were burned, and vast quantities of imita- 
tion money. A gorgeous imitation boat, natural size and com- 
plete in every detail from cabins to anchors, steamer chairs, 
and ample decks, was fitted up at a cost of $36,000 American 
money, and burned. Furthermore, as my friend was coming 
home one evening, he was surprised to see in an unexpected 
place, some distance ahead, a full regiment of soldiers, gor- 
geous in new uniforms, and hundreds of handsome cavalry 
horses. Getting closer, what was his amazement to find that 
these natural-size soldiers and steeds were only make-believe 
affairs to be burned for the dead monarchs! To maintain 
their rank in the Beyond they must have at least one full 
regiment at their command ! 

Since we are on such gruesome subjects we might as well 
finish with them now by considering the punishments in China. 
I went out to the execution grounds in Canton, but it hap- 
pened to be an off-day when nobody was due to suffer the 
death sentence. I did see the cross, though, on which the 
worst criminals are stretched and strangled before they are 
beheaded. The bodies of these malefactors are not allowed 
ordinary burial, but quick-limed, I believe. There were human 
bones beside the old stone wall where I walked, and when a 
Chinese brat lifted for a moment a sort of jute-bagging cover 
from a barrel the topmost skull of the heap grinned ghastly 
in the sunlight. 

The cruelty of Chinese punishments is a blot upon her civ- 
ilization. When I was in Shanghai a friend of mine told me 
of having been to a little town where two men had just been 
executed for salt-smuggling. Salt is a government monopoly 
in China, or at least is subject to a special revenue duty, so 
that salt smuggling is about equivalent to blockading whiskey 
in America. 



146 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Recognized forms of punishment are death by starvation 
and "death by the seventy -two cuts" — gradually chopping 
a man to pieces as if he were a piece of wood. This latter 
punishment is for treason. To let a bad criminal be hanged 
instead of beheaded is regarded as a favor, the explanation 
being that the man who has his head cut off is supposed to be 
without a head in the hereafter. 

The worst feature of the whole system is the treatment of 
prisoners to make them confess. The Chinese theory is that 
no one should be punished unless he confesses with his own 
mouth. Consequently the most brutal, sickening tortures 
are practised to extort confession, and, in the end, thousands 
and thousands of innocent men, no doubt, rather than Hve 
longer in miseries far worse than death, have professed crimes 
of which they were innocent. 

But let us turn now to happier topics : — say to an illus- 
tration of Chinese humor. Very well; here is the sort of 
story that tickles a Chinaman : it is one they tell themselves : 

A Chinaman had a magic jar. And when you think of a 
jar here don't think of one of the tiny affairs such as Americans 
use for preserves and jams. The jar here means a big affair 
about half the size of a hogshead: I bathed in one this morn- 
ing. It was in such jars that Ali Baba's Forty Thieves con- 
cealed themselves. Well, this magic jar had the power of 
multiplying whatever was put into it. If you put in a suit 
of clothes, behold, you could pull out perhaps two or three 
dozen suits! If you put in a silver dollar, you might get out 
a hundred silver dollars. There doesn't seem to have been 
any regularity about the jar's multiplying properties. Some- 
times it might multiply by two, while again it might multiply 
by a hundred. 

At any rate, the owner of the magic receptacle was gettmg 
rich fairly fast, when a greedy judge got word of the strange 
affair somehow. Accordingly he made some kind of false 
charge against the man and made him bring the jar into court. 




THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA 




CHINESE woman's RUINED FEET 

The building of the Great Wall, considered simply as a feat of Herculean 

labor, leaves us no room to boast over the Panama Canal 

The lower picture shows the terrible deformity produced by foot-binding 







CHIXI<:SE SCHOOL CHILDREN 




THE AMERICAN CONSULATE AT ANTUNG 

The upper picture suggests a word about the amazing fertility of tbe Oriental 
races — the Japanese, for example, increasing from their birth-rate alone as 
fast as the United States from its birth-rate plus its enormous immigration 

A great need of America in the East is better consular buildings. Witness 
this one at Antung 



FAREWELL TO CHINA 149 

Then the judge pretended that he couldn't decide about the 
case, or else pretended that the man needed punishment for 
something, and so wrongly refused to give the citizen's property 
back. Instead the magistrate took the jar into his own home 
and himself began to get rich on its labors. 

Now, when this happened, the friends of the mistreated man 
began to murmur. Failing to do anything with the mag- 
istrate, they appealed to the magistrate's father — for though 
you may be fifty or seventy years old in China, if your father 
is living you are as much subject to his orders as if you were 
only ten; this is the case just as long as you both live. But 
when the father spoke about the complaints of the people the 
magistrate lied about the jar somehow, but not in a way 
entirely to deceive the old fellow. He decided to do some 
investigating, and went blundering around into a dark room 
in search of the jar, and before he saw what he was doing came 
upon it and fell into it. Whereupon he cried to his son to 
pull him out. 

The son did come, but when he pulled out one father, be- 
hold there was another still in the jar — and then another and 
another and another. He pulled out one father after another 
till the whole room was full of fathers, and then he filled up 
the yard with fathers, and had six or eight standing like chick- 
ens on the stone wall before the accursed old jar would quit ! 
And to have left one father in there would naturally have 
been equivalent to murder. 

So this was the punishment of the unjust magistrate. He 
had, of course, to support all the dozens of aged fathers he 
pulled out of the jar (a Chinaman must support his father 
though he starve himself), and it is to be supposed that he used 
up all the wealth he had unjustly piled up, and had to work 
night and day as well all the rest of his life. Of course the jar, 
too, had to be returned to its owner, and in this way the whole 
community learned of the magistrate's unfairly withholding it. 

This story is interesting not only for its own sake, but for 



150 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

the light it sheds on Chinese life — the relations of father and 
son; the unjust oppression of the people by the oflScials in a 
land where the citizen is without the legal rights fundamental 
in American government; and, lastly, the "Arabian Nights"- 
like flavor of this typically Chinese piece of fiction. 

One of the funny things among the many funny things I 
have encountered in China is the pecuHar way of buying or 
selling land, as reported to me by Rev. Dr. R. T. Bryan. If 
you buy land from a Chinaman, about Shanghai at least, 
without knowing the custom of the country, you may have to 
make him three additional payments before you get through 
with him. For, according to the custom, after the first pay- 
ment he will give you a deed, but after a little while will come 
around sighing, regretting that he sold the land and complain- 
ing that you didn't pay enough. Accordingly, you will pay 
him a little more, and he will give you what is called a "sigh- 
ing paper," certifying that the "sighing money" has been 
paid. A few days or weeks pass and he turns up again. You 
didn't pay him quite enough before. Therefore, you make 
another small payment and he gives you the "add-a-little- 
more" paper showing that the "add-a-Httle-more" money has 
been paid. Last of all, you make what is called the "pull-up- 
root" payment, and the land is safely yours. 

Of course, the impatient foreigner hasn't time for this sort 
of thing, consequently he pays enough more in the beginning 
1o cancel these various dramatic performances. Doctor 
Bryan's deed certifies that the "sighing money," " add-a-little- 
more money," and "pull-up-root money" have all been settled 
to start with. 

"Pidgin English," or the corruptions of English words and 
phrases by means of which foreigners and Chinese exchange 
ideas, is also very amusing. "Pidgin English" means "business 
English," "pidgin" representing the Chinaman's attempt to 
say "business." Some of the Chinese phrases are very useful, 
such as "maskee" for our "never mind." Other good phrases 



FAREWELL TO CHINA 151 

are ** chop-chop" for "hurry up," "chin-chin" for "greeting," 
and "chow-chow" for "food." 

"Have you had plenty chow-chow?" my good-natured Chi- 
nese elevator-boy in Shanghai used to say to me after dinner; 
and the bright-eyed little brats at the temples in Peking used 
to explain their failure to do anything forbidden by saying 
they should get "plenty bamboo chow-chow"! Bamboos are 
used for switches (as well as for ten thousand other things), 
and "bamboo chow-chow" means the same thing to the Chi- 
nese boy as "hickory tea" to an American boy! 

A Scotch fellow-passenger was telling me the other day of 
the sajnng that "The Scotchman keeps the Sabbath day, and 
every other good thing he can lay his hands on." Now, the 
Chinaman, unlike the Scotchman, doesn't keep the Sabbath, 
but he does live up to all the requirements of the second clause 
of the proverb. Nothing goes to waste in China except hu- 
man labor, of which enough is wasted every year to make a 
whole nation rich, simply because it is not aided by effective 
implements and machinery. The bottles, the tin cans, the 
wooden boxes, the rags, the orange peels — everything we 
throw away — is saved. And the coolies work from early 
morn till late at night and every day in the week. Their 
own religion does not teach them to observe the seventh day, 
and this requirement of Christianity, in China as well as in 
Japan, is regarded as a great hardship upon its converts. 

Buddhism in China, as in Japan, it may also be observed Just 
here, is now only a hideous mixture of superstition and fraud. 
As I found believers in the Japanese temples rubbing images 
of men and bulls to cure their own pains, so in the great Bud- 
dhist temple at Canton I found the fat Buddha's body rubbed 
slick in order to bring flesh to thin supplicants, while one of 
the chief treasures of the temple is a pair of "fortune sticks." 
If the Chinese Buddhist wishes to undertake any new task or 
project, he first comes to the priest and tries out its advisa- 
bility with these "fortune sticks." If, when dropped to the 



152 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

floor, they lie in such a position as to indicate good luck, he 
goes ahead; otherwise he is likely to abandon the project. 

Let me close this chapter by noting a remark made to me by 
Dr. Timothy Richard, one of the most eminent religious and 
educational workers in the empire. 

"Do you know what has brought about the change in 
China?" he asked me one day in Peking. "Well, I'll tell you: 
it is a comparative view of the world. Twenty years ago 
the Chinese did not know how their country ranked with other 
countries in the elements of national greatness. They had 
been told that they were the greatest, wisest, and most power- 
ful people on earth, and they didn't care to know what other 
countries were doing. Since then, however, they have studied 
books, have sent their sons to foreign colleges and universities, 
and they have found out in what particulars China has fallen 
behind other nations. Now they have set out to remedy 
these defects. The comparative view of the world is what 
is bringing about the remaking of China." 

In China, no doubt, the men who have brought the people 
this "comparative view of the world" were criticised some- 
times for presuming to suggest that any other way might be 
better than China's way; but they kept to their work — and 
have won. Doctor Richard himself did much effective service 
by publishing a series of articles and diagrams showing how 
China compared with other countries in area, population, 
education, wealth, revenue, military strength, etc. Such com- 
parisons are useful for America as a country, and for individ- 
ual states and sections as well. 

Hong Kong, China. 



XVI 

WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES 

OF THE cruelty of Chinese punishments I have 
already had something to say, but there is at least 
one thing that should be said for the Chinese officials 
in this connection: No matter how heinous his 
crime, they have never sent a criminal from Hong Kong to 
Manila in an Indo-China boat in the monsoon and typhoon 
season. 

Dante could have found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the 
voyage as I made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday 
night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean 
over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost 
completely to one side, shivered, trembled, and recovered itself, 
only to yield again to the wrath and fury of mountain-like waves 
hurled thundering against it and over it. The crack where 
the door fitted over the sill furnished opening enough to flood 
my cabin. In spite of the heat not even a crack could be 
opened at the top of the window until Monday morning. A 
bigger ship a few hours ahead of us found the sea in an even 
more furious mood. The captain stayed on the bridge practi- 
cally without sleep three days and nights, going to bed, spent 
with fatigue and watching, as soon as he came at last into sight 
of Manila. Two weeks ago the captain of another ship came 
into port so much used up that he resigned and gave his first 
mate command of the vessel, while still another vessel has just 
limped into Manila disabled after bujffeting the storm for a 
brief period. 

153 



154 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

At any rate, the trip is over now, and I write this in Manila, 
with its tropical heat and vegetation, its historic associations, 
its strange mixture of savage, Spanish, and American influences. 
The Pasig River, made famous in the war days of '98, flows 
past my hotel, and beautiful Manila Bay, glittering in the fierce 
December sunlight, recalls memories of Dewey and our navy. 
But the moss-green walls about the old Spanish city remind 
us of days of romance and tragedy more fascinating than any 
of the events of our own generation. In the days when Spain 
made conquest of the world these streets were laid out, and the 
statues of her sovereigns, imperious and imperial, still stand 
here to remind us that nations, like men, are mortal, and that 
for follies or mistakes a people no less surely than an individ- 
ual must pay the price. 

Nor let our own proud America, boasting of her greater area 
and richer resources, think she may ignore the lessons the history 
of her predecessors here may teach. The statue of Bourbon 
Don Carlos in his royal robe that stands amid the perennial 
green of the Cathedral Park — it may well bring our American 
officers who look out daily upon it, and the other Americans 
who come here, a feeling not of pride but of profound and 
reverent humility: 

" God of Our Fathers, known'of old. 
Lord of our far-flung battle-line. 
Beneath whose awful hand we hold 
Dommion over palm and pine. 
Judge of the nations, spare us yet,] 
Lest we forget, lest we forget ! " 

In order to see what the Philippine country looks like, I 
left Manila Thursday and made the long, hot trip to Daguban, 
travelling through the provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga, 
Tarlac, and Pangasinan. The first four of these are known as 
Tagalog provinces; the fifth is inhabited by Ilocanos and Pam- 
pangans. Three dialects or languages are spoken by the 



WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES 155 

tribes in the territory covered. Not far beyond Daguban are 
savage dog-eating, head-hunting tribes; taos, or peasants, buy 
dogs around Daguban and sell to these savages at good profits. 

The provinces I travelled through are typical of Filipinoland 
generally. Rather sparsely settled, only the smaller part of 
the land is under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high 
tigbao or Tampa grass, or covered with small forest trees. 
Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo 
is most in evidence; but the broad-leaved banana ranks easily 
next. The high topknot growth of the cocoanut palm and 
the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papaya afford a spectacle 
unlike anything we see at home. About Daguban especially 
many cocoanuts are grown, and the clumps of trees by the 
Agno River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River 
Nile in the time of Pharaoh — especially when I looked at 
the plowing going on around them. For the Filipino's plow 
is modelled closely on the old Egyptian implement, and hasn't 
been much changed. A properly crooked small tree or limb 
serves for a handle, another crooked bough makes the beam, 
and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, some of 
the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A 
piece of wood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another 
piece like U with the prongs pulled wide apart serves as a single- 
tree. Then, with two pieces of rope connecting primitive 
hame and single-tree, the Filipino's harness is complete. 

Before going into any further description of the plows, how- 
ever, let us get our picture of the typical country on the Island 
of Luzon as I saw it on this hot December day. Great fields 
of rice here and there, ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring 
little brown men and women cutting the crop with old-fashioned 
knives and sickles; the general appearance not unlike an 
American wheat or oat harvest in early summer. Bigger fields 
of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper two feet green, 
the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some of 
it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of 



156 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp 
low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small 
freight boats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed out 
of single logs. 

Most striking of all are the houses in which the people live, 
clustered in villages, as are farmhouses in almost every part 
of the world except in America. Surrounded in most cases 
by the massive luxuriance of a banana grove, the FiUpino's 
hut stands on stilts as high as his head, and often higher. 
One always enters by a ladder. In most instances there are 
two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12 feet, and a sort of 
lean-to adjoining, through which the ladder comes. A one- 
horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the larger Filipino 
home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, 
but of bamboo — the ever-serviceable bamboo — which, as my 
readers probably know, strongly resembles the fishing-pole 
reeds that grow on our river banks. The sills, sleepers, and 
scaffolding of the house are made of larger bamboo trunks, six 
inches or less in diameter; the split trunks form the floor; 
the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat like that of 
which we make our hamper baskets and split-bottom chairs; 
the roofing is of nipal, which looks much like very long corn 
shucks. 

In short, imagine an enormous hamper basket, big enough 
to hold six or eight hogsheads, put on stilts, and covered with 
shucks: such in appearance is the Filipino's house. Around 
it are banana trees bent well toward the ground by the weight 
of the one great bunch at the top, and possibly a few bamboo 
and cocoanut trees. For human ornaments there are rather 
small and spare black-haired, black-eyed, brown-skinned men, 
women, and children in clothing rather gayly colored — as 
far as it goes : in some cases it doesn't go very far. The favorite 
color with the women-folk is a sort of peach-blossom mixture 
of pink and white or a bandanna-handkerchief combination 
of red and white. Bare feet are most common, but many 




A FILIPINO S HOME 
Nearly all the native houses I saw in the rural Philippines were of this type 
— about this size, set on stilts, and constructed of similar material. The 
scene is not quite natural-looking, however, without a banana grove and a 
fighting cock or two 




THE CAKAJ5AO, THE WORK-STOCK OF THE MLIPIXOS 




AN OLD SPANISH CATHEDRAL 

Of all the native Oriental peoples, the Filipinos alone have become thoroughly 

Christianized. The great majority are Catholics 



WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES 159 

wear slippers, and not a few are now slaves enough to fashion 
to wear American shoes. The men, except the very poorest, 
wear white, nor is it a white worn dark by dirt such as Koreans 
wear, but a spotless, newly washed white. Nearly every Filipino 
seems to have on clothes that were laundered the day before. 
A sort of colored gauze is frequently the only outer garment 
worn by either men or women on the upper part of the body. 

The beast of burden in the Philippines, the ungainly, slow- 
moving animal that pulls the one-handled plows and the two- 
wheeled carts, is the carabao. The carabao, or water buffalo, 
is about the size of an ordinary American ox, and much like 
the ox, but his hide is black, thick, and looks almost as tough 
as an alligator's; his horns are enormous, and he has very little 
hair. Perhaps his having lived in the water so much accounts 
for the absence of the hair. Even now he must every day 
submerge himself contentedly in deep water, must cover his 
body like a pig in a wallow: this is what makes life worth living 
for him. Furthermore, when he gives word that he is thirsty 
Mr. Tao (the peasant) must not delay watering him; in this 
hot climate thirst may drive him furiously, savagely mad, and 
the plowman may not be able to climb a cocoanut tree quick 
enough to escape hurt. 

I saw quite a few goats, some cattle, a few hogs, and, of course, 
some dogs. Much as the Filipino may care for his dog, how- 
ever, he always reserves the warmest place in his heart for 
nothing else but his gamecock, his fighting rooster. Cock- 
fighting, and the gambling inseparably connected with it, are 
his delight, and no Southern planter ever regarded a favorite 
fox-hound with more pride and affection than the Filipino 
bestows on his favorite chicken. In grassy yards you will 
see the rooster tied by one leg and turned out to exercise, as 
we would stake a cow to graze, while his owner watches and 
fondles him. I shall never forget a gray-headed, bright-eyed, 
barefooted old codger I saw near Tarlac stroking the feathers 
of his bird, while in his eyes was the pride as of a woman over 



160 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

her first-born. A man often carries his gamecock with him 
as a negro v/ould carry a dog, and he is as ready to back his 
Judgment with his last centavo as was the owner of Mark 
Twain's "Jumping Frog" before that ill-fated creature dined 
too heartOy on buckshot. Sundays and saints' days are the 
days for cock-fighting — and both come pretty often. 

I wish I could give my readers a ghmpse of the passengers 
who got on and off my train between Manila and Daguban: 
Filipino women carrying baskets on their heads, smoking ciga- 
rettes, and looking after babies — in some cases doing all three 
at once; Filipino men, likewise smoking, and with various kinds 
of luggage, including occasional gamecocks; Filipino children 
in most cases "undressed exceedingly," as Mr. Kipling would 
say; and American soldiers in khaki uniforms and helmets. 
At one place a pretty little twelve-year-old girl gets aboard, 
delighted that she is soon to see America for the first time in 
six years. For a while I travel with an American surveyor 
whose work is away out where he must swim unbridged streams, 
guard against poisonous snakes, and sleep where he can. 
An army surgeon tells me as we pass the site of a battle between 
the Americans and the Filipino insurgents eleven years ago: 
the Filipinos would not respect the Red Cross, and the doctors 
and hospital corps had to work all night with their guns be- 
side them, alternately bandaging wounds and firing on savages. 
In telling me good-bye a young Westerner sends regards to 
all America. "Even a piece of Arizona desert would look 
good to me," he declares; "anything that's U.S.A." A young 
veterinarian describes the government's efforts to exterminate 
rinderpest, a disease which in some sections has killed nine 
tenths of the carabao. A campaign as thorough and far-reaching 
as that which the Agricultural Department at home is waging 
against cattle ticks is in progress, but the ignorant farmers 
cannot understand the regulations, and are greatly hindering 
a work which means so much of good to them. 

Such are a few snapshots of Philippine life. 



WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES 161 

Of the vast natural resources of the Philippines there can 
be no question. With a fertile soil, varied products, immense 
forest wealth, and possibly extensive mineral wealth; with 
developing railway and steamship lines; with the markets of 
the Orient right at her doors and special trade advantages with 
the United States — with all these advantages, the islands 
might soon become rich, if there were only an industrious pop- 
ulation. 

Unfortunately, the Filipino, however, doesn't like work. 
Whether or not this dislike is incurable remains to be seen. 
Perhaps as he comes into contact with civilization he may con- 
ceive a liking for other things than rice, fish, a loin-cloth, and 
shade — plenty of shade — and proceed to put forth the effort 
necessary to get these other things. Already there seems 
to have been a definite rise in the standards of living since the 
American occupation. "When I came here in '98," Mr. Wil- 
liam Crozier said to me, "not one native in a hundred wore 
shoes, and hats were also the exception; you can see for yourself 
how great is the change since then." 

Moreover, in not a few cases Americans who have complained 
of difiiculty in getting labor have been themselves to blame: 
they tried to hire and manage labor the American way instead 
of in the Filipino way. The custombre, as the Spanish call 
it — that is to say, the custom of the country — is a factor 
which no man can ignore without paying the penalty. 

I am having to prepare this article very hurriedly, and I must 
pospone my comment on the work of the American Government 
until later. In closing, however, I am reminded that just as 
the old proverb says, "It takes all sorts of people to make a 
world," so I am seeing all sorts. A week ago yesterday the 
Hong Kong papers announced that Mr. Clarence Poe would 
be the guest at luncheon of his Excellency the Governor- 
General, Sir Frederick Lugard, K. C. M. G., C. B., D. S. O., 
etc., and Lady Lugard, in the executive mansion; yesterday 



162 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

I had "chow" (food) in a Filipino's place, "The Oriental 
Hotel, Bar, and Grocery," away up in the Province of Pan- 
gasinan, and climbed to my room and cot on a sort of ladder 
or open work stairs such as one might expect to find in an ordi- 
nary barn! It was the best place I could find in town. 

Nor do the incongruities end here. After getting my even- 
ing meal I walked out in the warm December moonlight, past 
the shadows of the strange buildings and tropical trees — and 
all at once there burst out the full chorus of one of the 
world's great operas, the magnificent voice of a Campanini or 
Caruso dominating all ! 

Great is the graphophone, advance agent of civilization! 

Manila, P. I. 



xvn 

WHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN THE 
PHILIPPINES 

THERE are so many islands in the Philippine group, 
which I have just left behind me (I write in a steamer 
off ' ila), that if a man were to visit one a day, 
wit at stopping for Sundays, it would take him 
eight years to get around. Most of these islands though, of 
course, are little more than splotches on the water's surface 
and do not appear on the map. The two big ones, Mindanao 
and Luzon, contain three fourths of the total land surface of 
127,000 square miles, leaving the other one fourth to be divided 
among the other 3138 islets. 

The land area statistics just given indicate that the Philip- 
pines are about the size of three average American states 
and the population (7,000,000) is about three times that of an 
average American commonwealth. There are only about 
30,000 white people in the islands, and 50,000 Chinese. Chinese 
immigration is now prohibited. 

The 7,000,000 native Filipinos who make up practically 
the entire population represent all stages of human progress. 
The lowest of them are head-hunters and hang the skulls of 
their human enemies outside their huts, as an American hunter 
would mount the head of an elk or bear. The great majority, 
however, have long been Christians and have attained a fair 
degree of civilization. Even among the savage tribes a high 
moral code is often enforced. The Igorrotes, for example, 
though some of their number make it a condition of marriage 

163 



164 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

that the young brave shall have taken a head, shall have killed 
his man, have remarkable standards of honor and virtue in 
some respects, and formally visit the death penalty as the 
punishment for adultery. Because roads or means of commu- 
nication have been poor the people have mingled but little, 
and there are three dozen different dialects. In the course 
of a haK day's journey by rail I found three different lan- 
guages spoken by the people along the route. The original 
inhabitants were Negritos, a race of pigmy blacks, of whom 
only a remnant remains, but the Filipino proper is a Malayan. 

Filipinos are unique in that they alone among all the native 
peoples of Asia have accepted Christianity. Fortunate in 
being without the gold of Mexico or Peru, the Philippines did 
not attract the more brutal Spanish adventurers who, about 
the time of Magellan's discovery, were harrying wealthier 
peoples with fire and sword. Instead of the soldier or the 
adventurer, it was the priest, his soul aflame with love for his 
church, who came to the Philippines, and the impression 
made by his virtues was not negatived by the bloody crimes of 
fellow Spaniards mad with lust of treasure. The result is 
that to this day probably 90 per cent, of the Filipinos are Cath- 
olics. Before the priests came, the people worshipped their 
ancestors, as do other peoples in the Far East. 

The only Asiatics who have accepted Christianity, the Fili- 
pinos are also the only Asiatics among whom women are not 
regarded as degraded and inferior beings. "If the Spaniards 
had done nothing else here," as a high American official in Ma- 
nila said to me, "though, as a matter of fact, we are beginning 
to recognize that they did a great deal, they would deserve 
well of history for what they have accomplished for the eleva- 
tion of woman through the introduction of Christianity. No 
other religion regards woman as man's equal." 

The testimony I heard in the Philippines indicated that the 
female partner in the household is, if anything, superior in 
authority to the man. She is active in all the little business 



THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 165 

affairs of the family, and white people sometimes arrange with 
Filipino wives for the employment of husbands! 

The resources of the islands, as I have already said, are mag- 
nificent and alluring. In the provinces through which I trav- 
elled, less than 10 per cent, of the land seemed to be under culti- 
vation, and statistics show that this is the general condition. 
A small area has suflBced to produce a living for the tao, or 
peasant, and he has not cultivated more — a fact due in part 
to laziness and in part to poor means of transportation. What 
need to produce what cannot be taken to market? This fact, 
in my opinion, goes far to account for Filipino unaggressiveness. 

According to the latest figures, the average size of the farms 
in the Philippines, including the large plantations, is less than 
eight acres, and the principal products are hemp, sugarcane, 
tobacco, cocoanuts, and rice. The Manila hemp plant looks 
for all the world like the banana plant (both belong to the same 
family), and the newcomer cannot tell them apart. The 
fibre is in the trunk or bark. Sisal hemp, which I found much 
like our yucca or "bear grass," is but little grown. Sugar- 
cane is usually cultivated in large plantations, as in Louisiana, 
these plantations themselves called haciendas, and their owners 
hadenderos. The tobacco industry is an important one, and 
would be even if the export averaging half a million 
cigars for every day in the year were stopped, for the Fili- 
pinos themselves are inveterate smokers. The men smoke, 
the women smoke, the children smoke — usually cigarettes, 
but sometimes cigars of enormous proportions. "When I first 
came here," Prof. C. M. Conner said to me, "it amused me to 
ask a Filipino how far it was to a certain place, and have him 
answer, 'Oh, two or three cigarettes,' meaning the distance a 
man should walk in smoking two or three cigarettes ! " Cocoa- 
nut-raising is a very profitable industry — all along the Pasig 
River in Manila you can see the native boats high-packed 
with the green, unhusked product, and two towns in Batan- 
zas shipped 1500 carloads last year. It is also believed that 



166 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

the rubber industry would pay handsomely. The rubber- 
producing trees I saw about Manila were very promising. 

Coffee plantations brought their owners handsome incomes 
until about twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating 
than the cotton boll weevil, came with destruction as swift 
as that which befell Sennacherib. I heard the story of an 
old plantation near Lipa, whose high-bred Castilian owner 
once lived in splendor, his imported horses gay in harness made 
of the finest silver, but the blight which ruined his coffee plants 
was equally a blight to his fortunes and his home and it is now 
given over to weeds and melancholy ruins. In some sections, 
however, coffee is still grown successfully, and I was much 
interested in seeing the shrubs in bearing. 

The Philippines are about the only place I have found since 
leaving home where the people are not trying to grow cotton. 
In California, in the Hawaiian Islands, in Japan, in Korea, 
and even in Manchuria as far north as Philadelphia, I have 
found the plants, and of course in China proper. But I should 
add just here, that in Southern China, about Canton, I did 
not find cotton. As for the industry in the Philippines, a South- 
ern man, now connected with the Agricultural Department in 
Manila, said to me: "Cotton acts funny here. It runs to 
weed. I planted some and it opened five or six bolls a stalk 
and then quit: died down." He showed me some "tree cotton," 
about twenty feet high, and also some of the Caravonica cotton 
from Australia, which is itself much like a small tree. 

When it comes to the lumber industry, not even Col. Mul- 
berry Sellers would be likely to overestimate the possibilities 
the Philippines offer. There are literally millions in it. The 
government is leasing immense areas on a stumpage royalty 
of about 1 per cent., and as railways are built the industry 
will expand. Fortunately, there are strict regulations to prevent 
the destruction of the forests. They must be used, not wasted. 
The authorities realize that while timber is a crop like other 
crops, it differs from the other crops in that the harvesting must 



THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 167 

never be complete. The cutting of trees below a certain mini- 
mum size is forbidden. 

And now a word as to the activities of the American Govern- 
ment in the islands and the agencies through which these 
activities are conducted. The supreme governing body is 
known as the Philippine Commission, consisting of the Gover- 
nor-General, who is ex-officio president, and seven other mem- 
bers (four Americans, three Filipinos) appointed by the Presi- 
dent of the United States. Four of these commissioners (three 
of these are Americans) are heads of departments, having 
duties somewhat like those of Cabinet officers in America. This 
commission is not only charged with the executive duties, 
but it acts as the Upper House or Senate of the Philippine 
Congress. That is to say, the voters elect an Assembly corre- 
sponding to our House of Representatives, but no legisla- 
tion can become effective unless approved by the Philippine 
Commission acting as the Upper House. In the first two 
elections, those of 1907 and 1909, the advocates of early in- 
dependence, opponents of continued American supremacy, 
have predominated. The result has been that the American 
members of the commission have had to kill numberless bills 
passed by the Assembly. On the other hand, some very 
necessary and important measures advocated by the commis- 
sion, measures which would be very helpful to the Filipinos, 
are opposed by the Assembly either through ignorance or 
stubbornness. Most of the Assembly members are of the 
politician type, mestizos or half-breeds (partly Spanish or 
Chinese), and very young. "In fact," a Manila man said to 
me, "when adjournment is taken, it is hard for a passerby 
to tell whether it is the Assembly that has let out or the High 
School!" The people in the provinces elect their own gover- 
nors and city officials. 

In some respects the legislation for the Philippines adopted 
by the American officials at Washington and Manila has been 
quite progressive. To begin with, our Republican National 



168 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Administration frankly recognized the blunders made in the 
South during Reconstruction days, and has practically en- 
dorsed the general policy of sufiFrage restriction which the 
South has since adopted. When the question came up as to 
who should be allowed to vote, even for the limited number of 
elective offices, no American Congressman was heard to pro- 
pose that there should be unrestricted manhood suffrage. 
Instead, the law as passed provides that in order to vote in 
the Philippines one must be 23 years of age, a subject of no 
foreign power, and must either (1) have held some responsible 
office before August 13, 1898, or (2) own $250 worth of prop- 
erty or pay $15 annually in established taxes, or (3) be able 
to speak, read, and write English or Spanish. Of course, the 
Filipinos, with a few exceptions, do not "speak, read, or write" 
English or Spanish; they have been taught only their own 
dialect. I understand that only 2 per cent, of the people can 
vote under these provisions. 

It should be said just here, however, that the government 
is now making a magnificent effort to educate all the Filipinos, 
and the schools are taught in English. The fact that half a 
million boys and girls had been put into public schools was the 
first boasted achievement of the American administration of 
the islands. It was, indeed, a great change from Spanish 
methods, but in the last three or four years the officials have 
been rapidly waking up to the fact that while they have been 
getting the Filipinos into the schools, they have not been getting 
them into the right sort of schools. 

With the realization of this fact, a change has been made 
in the kind of instruction given. More and more the schools 
have been given an industrial turn. When I visited the 
Department of Education in Manila I found that old text- 
books had been discarded and new text-books prepared — 
books especially suited to Philippine conditions and directed to 
practical ends. Instead of a general physiology describing 
bones, arteries, and nerve centres, I found a little book on 



THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 169 

"Sanitation and Hygiene in the Tropics," written in simple 
language, profusely illustrated, and with information which the 
pupil can use in bettering the health of himself, his family, 
and his neighborhood. Instead of a general book on agricul- 
ture, I found a book written so as to fit the special needs, crops, 
and conditions in the Philippines. Moreover, I found the 
officials exhibiting as their chief treasures the specimens of 
work turned out by the pupils as a result of the practical in- 
struction given them. 

"I really think," said one of the officers, "that we have 
carried the idea of industrial education, of making the schools 
train for practical life, much farther in the Philippines than 
it has been carried in the United States. The trouble at home 
is that our teachers don't introduce industrial education early 
enough. They wait until the boy enters the upper grades 
— if he doesn't leave school before entering them at all, as he 
probably does. In any case, they reach only a few pupils. Our 
success, on the other hand, is due to the fact that we begin 
with industrial education in the earlier grades and get every- 
body." 

And right here is a valuable lesson for those of us who are 
interested in getting practical training for white boys and girls 
in America as well as for brown boys and girls in the Philip- 
pines. 

Another progressive step was the introduction of postal 
savings banks for the Filipinos before any law was passed 
giving similar advantage to the white people of the United 
States. The law has worked well. In fact, the increase in 
number of depositors last year, from 8782 to 13,102 — nearly 
50 per cent, in a single twelvemonth — would indicate that 
the people are getting enthusiastic about it and that it is 
achieving magnificent results in stimulating thrift and the 
saving habit. 

The government has also introduced the Torrens System 
of Registering Land Titles, as it has done in Hawaii. Formerly 



170 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

the farmer or the peasant paid 20 per cent, or more for advances 
or loans. With his land registered under the Torrens system 
the bank will lend him money at a normal rate of interest, 
with nothing wasted in lawyers' fees for expensive investigations 
of all previous changes in title since the beginning of time. 
Judge Charles B. Elliott, now Secretary of Commerce and 
Police for the islands, was on the Minnesota Supreme Bench 
when the Torrens plan was put into force there, and he is 
enthusiastic about its workings both in his home state in 
America and in the Philippines. 

For the public health an especially fruitful work has been 
done by the Americans, albeit the Filipino has often had much 
to say in criticism of the methods of saving life, and but little 
in praise of the work itself. " The hate of those ye better, 
the curse of those ye bless" may usually be confidently 
counted on by those who bear the White Man's Burden, 
and this seems to have been especially true with regard 
to health work in the East. In the Philippines the farmers 
object to the quarantine restrictions that would save their 
carabao from rinderpest; they object to the regulations 
that look to stamping out cholera, and I suppose the 
isolation and colonization of lepers, who formerly ran at large, 
has also been unpopular. In spite of opposition, vaccination 
is now general; pock-marked Filipinos will not be so common 
in future. 

Nor is it likely that there will be many reports of cholera 
outbreaks such as an ex-army nurse described to me a few days 
ago: "When I was in Iloilo in 1902," she said, "it was im- 
possible to dig graves for the poor natives as fast as they died. 
The men were kept digging, at the point of the bayonet, all 
night long — pits 100 feet long, 7 feet wide and 7 feet deep, 
in which the bodies of the dead were thrown and quick-limed 
— and yet I remember that on one occasion 235 corpses lay for 
forty-eight hours before we could find graves for them." 

In Manila statistics show that 44 per cent, of the deaths are 



THE UNITED STATES IN THE PHILIPPINES 171 

of babies under one year old, and the ignorance of the mothers 
as to proper methods of feeding and nursing has resulted in a 
shockingly high death rate of little ones all over the Philippines. 
I noticed that the new school text-book on sanitation and hy- 
giene gives especial attention to the care of infants, and it is 
said that already the school boys and girls are often able to 
give their mothers helpful counsel. In this fact we have 
another good suggestion for the school authorities at home, 
where it is said that proper knowledge and care would save the 
lives of a million infants a year. 

Hardly less important than the school work has been the 
road-building undertaken by the American officials. And in 
Philippine road work a most excellent example has been set 
for the states at home, in that the authorities have given atten- 
tion not only to building roads but to maintaining them after 
they are built. Too many American communities vote a heavy 
bond issue for roads and think that ends the matter. In the 
Philippines no such mistake has been made. "With the hea^7■ 
rains here," the Governor-General said to me, "our entire in- 
vestment in a piece of good road would be lost in four years^ 
time if repair work were not carefully looked after." 

The system adopted for keeping up the roads is very interest- 
ing. Everywhere along the fine highways I travelled over 
there were at intervals piles or pens of crushed stone and other 
material for filling up any hole or break. For each mile or so a 
Filipino is employed — he is called a caminero — and his whole 
duty is to take a wheelbarrow and a few tools and keep that 
piece of road in shape. 

Prizes of $5000 each are also offered to the province that 
maintains the best system of first-class roads, to the province 
that spends the largest proportion of its funds on roads and 
bridges, and to the province that shows the best and most 
complete system of second-class roads. 

That the Filipinos are unfit to face the world alone there 
can be little doubt. As to whether it is our business in that 



172 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

case to manage for them is another question. The Filipinos 
are, like our negroes, a child-race in habits of thought, whatever 
they may be from the standpoint of the evolutionist. "I 
never get angry with them, however much they may obstruct 
my plans," an American of rank said to me, "for I look on 
them as children. We are running a George Junior Republic; 
that's what it amounts to." Another American, who has had 
some experience with the Assembly, said to me: "When you 
have explained and reiterated some apparently simple proposi- 
tion, they will come to you a day or so later with some element- 
ary question amazing for its childishness." A large number of 
excellent measures for which the Assembly has received the 
credit were really instigated by the commission — "person- 
ally conducted legislation," it is called. 

The Filipinos come of a race which has achieved more than 
the negro race, but on the whole they are probably hardly 
better fitted for self-government than the negroes of the 
South would be to-day if all the whites should move away. 
As a Republican of some prominence at home said to me in 
Manila: "A crowd of ten-year-old schoolboys in Chicago 
would know better how to run a government." 

The mere fact that the Filipinos are not capable of managing 
wisely for themselves, of course, is not enough to justify a colo- 
nial or imperialistic policy on the part of the United States. 
It is not our business to go up and down the earth taking charge 
of everybody who is not managing his affairs as well as we 
think we could manage for him. But, in any case, there is 
no use to delude ourselves as to what are the real qualifications 
of Mr. Filipino. 

I believe that the United States should eventually with- 
draw from the islands, but when it does so there should be 
an understanding with the Powers that will prevent the natives 
from being exploited by some other nation. 

China Sea, off Manila Harbor. 




XVIII 

ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 

[ HE prosperity of every man depends upon the pros- 
perity (and therefore upon the efficiency) of the 
Average Man. 

So I have argued for years, in season and out 
of season, in newspaper articles and in public addresses; and 
the most impressive fact I have discovered in all my travel 
through the Orient is the fundamental, world-wide importance 
of this too little accepted economic doctrine. It is the biggest 
lesson the Old World has for the New — the biggest and the 
most important. 

In America, education, democratic institutions, a proper 
organization of industry: these have given the average 
man a high degree of efficiency and therefore a high 
degree of prosperity as compared with the lot of the aver- 
age man in Asia or Europe — a prosperity heightened and 
enhanced, it is true, by the exploitation of a new continent's 
virgin resources, but, after all, due mainly, primarily, as we 
have said, to the high degree of efficiency with which the 
average man does his work. 

And while there may be "too much Ego in our Cosmos," 
as Kipling's German said about the monkey, for us to like to 
admit it, the plain truth is that, no matter what our business, 
we chiefly owe our prosperity not to our own efforts, but to the 
high standards of intelligence, efficiency, and prosperity on 
the part of our people as a whole. We live in better homes, eat 
more wholesome food, wear better clothing, have more leisure 

173 



174 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

and more recreation, endure less bitter toil; in short, we find 
human life fairer and sweeter than our fellow man in Asia, not 
because you or I as individuals deserve so much better than he, 
but because of our richer racial heritage. We have been 
born into a society where a higher level of prosperity obtains, 
where a man's labor and effort count for more. 

In China a member of the Emperor's Grand Council told 
me that the average rate of wages throughout the empire for 
all classes of labor is probably 18 cents a day. In Japan it 
is probably not more, and in India much less. The best mill 
workers I saw in Osaka average 22 cents a day; the laborers 
at work on the new telephone line in Peking get 10 cents; wheel- 
barrow coolies in Shanghai $4 a month; linotype operators in 
Tokyo 45 cents a day, and pressmen 50; policemen 40; the iron- 
workers in Hankow average about 10 cents; street-car con- 
ductors in Seoul make 35 cents; farm laborers about Nankou 
10 cents; the highest wages are paid in the Philippines, where 
the ordinary laborer gets from 20 to 50 cents.* 



*Since writing the foregoing I have looked up the latest official statistics for 
Japan in the " Financial and Economic Annual for 1910," the latest figures 
compiled to date being for 1908. In 1908 wages had increased on the whole 
40 per cent, above 1900 figures, and I give herewith averages for certain classes 
of workmen for 1899 and 1908: 

Daily Wages in Cents 

1899 1908 

Farm laborer, male : $0. 13 $0.19 

Farm laborer, female . S}4 H/^ 

Gardener .24 .34 

Weaver, male .15 .22 

Weaver, female .09 .12 

Shoemaker 22j^ 32j^ 

Carpenter 25 .40 

Blacksmith 23 .34 

Day laborer .17 .26^ 

When I asked Director Matsui m hat he paid the hands I saw at work on the 
Agricultural College farm, he answered, " Well, boiiig so near Tokyo, we have 
to pay 30 to 40 sen (15 to 20 cents) a day, but in the country, generally, I should 
say 20 to 35 sen" (10 to 13j^ cents a day). 



ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 175 

Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even 
at these low figures; men work longer hours than in America, 
and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness: 
tasks such as an American laborer would regard as in- 
human. 

Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. 
He is doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and 
for wages such as our Southern negroes would refuse for ordi- 
nary labor. More than this, in most cases he is selling you not 
only his time but his life-blood. Run he must with his human 
burden, and faster than Americans would care to run without 
a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his heart and 
shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds of 
weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver 
in the winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure 
and the overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw 
man's life, I was told in Japan, is several years shorter than 
that of the average man. 

And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into 
the rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which 
it is not overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost 
thought my life endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, 
and fought for the privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare 
my patronage involved. In Hong Kong two runners, wild- 
eyed with the keenness of the savage struggle for existence, 
menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired as if they would 
take me by force from his vehicle to their own — and this for 
a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than feel 
myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a 
fellow being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in 
Hankow, where not even the brutal clubbing of the policeman 
was enough to keep the men in order. In wintry Newchwang I 
think I suffered almost as much as my rickshaw man did merely 
to see him wading through mud and foulness such as I should 
not wish my horse to go through at home — though if he had 



176 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used 
to it! 

I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls 
the jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not 
be crowded if it were not that the men find life in other lines 
no better. Consider the men who carried me in my sedan 
chair in Canton. As each man fitted the wooden shafts over 
his shoulders I could see that they were welted with corns like 
a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a sum- 
mer's plowing. 

Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who 
do the work not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From 
the time you land in Yokahoma your heart is made sick by 
the sight of half-naked human-beings harnessed like oxen to 
heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring 
like slaves at the oar, they draw their heavy burdens through 
the streets. One or two men wearily pull an immense tele- 
graph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten 
men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy 
freight. Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy 
building-stone or piece of machinery by running bamboo sup- 
ports from the shoulders of the men behind to the shoulders 
of the men in front: you can see the constant, tortuous play 
of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while the 
strained, monotonous, half -weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! 
Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain 
from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock 
work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by 
human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus 
is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel, 
forever climbing and never advancing. 

Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens 
such as only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children 
who should have the freedom that even the young colt gets 
— how my heart has gone out to them cheated out of the joys 



ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 177 

of childhood ! And the women with children strapped on their 
backs while they steer boats and handle passengers and traf- 
fic about Hong Kong ! Or leave, if you will, the water-front at 
Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep, bluff-like, 
1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome residences 
of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every mas- 
sive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone 
was carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain 
of human muscle — and not merely human muscle, but in 
most cases the muscles of women! Probably no governor in 
any state in America lives in a residence so splendid as that 
of the governor-general of Hong Kong — certainly no gover- 
nor's residence is so beautifully situated, halfway up a sheer 
mountain-slope — and yet the wife of the governor-general 
told me that the material used in the building was brought 
up the mountainside by women! 

Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned 
in a former letter the mills in Shanghai where women work 
13| hours for 12 cents a day; and in most cases the women in 
Eastern factories are herded together in crowded compounds 
little better than the workhouses for American criminals! 

Or consider the rice farmers who wade through mud knee- 
deep to plant the rice by hand, cultivate it with primitive tools, 
and harvest it with sickles. And after all this, they must often 
sell the rice they grow, and themselves buy cheaper millet or 
poorer rice for their own food. The situation has probably 
improved somewhat since Col. Charles Denby published his 
book five years ago, but in its general outlines the plight of 
the typical Chinese farmer as described by him then is true 
to-day: 

"The average wage of an able-bodied young man is $12 per annum, with 
food and lodging, straw shoes, and free shaving — an important item in a coun- 
try where heads must be shaved three or four times a month. His clothing 
costs about $4 per annmn. In ten years he may buy one third of an acre of 
land ($150 per acre) and necessary implements. In ten years more he may 



178 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

double his holdings and become part-owner in a water buffalo. In six years 
more he can procure a wife and live comfortably on his estate. Thus in twenty- 
six years he has gained a competence." 

So much by way of a faint picture of existing industrial 
conditions in the Orient. Let us now see what there is for us 
to learn from these facts. 

First of all, we may inquire why such conditions obtain. 
Why is it that the Oriental gets such low wages, and has such 
low earning power? "An overcrowded population," some- 
body answers, "in China, for example, four hundred million 
people — one fourth the human race — crowded within the 
limits of one empire. This is the cause." 

I don't believe it. 

There is a limit no doubt beyond which increase of pop- 
ulation, even with the most highly developed syjstem of in- 
dustry, might lead to such a result, but I do not believe that 
this limit has been reached even in China. The people in 
England live a great deal better to-day than they did when 
England had only one tenth its present population. The 
average man in your county has more conveniences, comforts, 
and a better income than he had in your grandfather's day 
when the population was not nearly so dense. The United 
States with a population of ninety odd million pays its laborers 
vastly better than it did when its population was only thirty 
million. 

The truth is that every man should be able to earn a little 
more than he consumes; there should be a margin, an excess 
which should constitute his contribution to the "common- 
wealth," to the race. Our buildings, roads, railroads, churches, 
cathedrals, works of art — everything which makes the 
modern world a better place to live in than the primitive world 
was: these represent the combined contributions of all pre- 
vious men and races. And if society is so able to handle men 
that they produce any fraction more than they consume, the 
more men the better the world. 



ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 179 

My conviction is that the Oriental nations are poor, not 
because of their dense populations, but because of their defec- 
tive industrial organizations, because they do not provide 
men Tools and Knowledge to work with. 

Ignorance and lack of machinery — these have kept Asia 
poor; knowledge and modern tools — these have made America 
rich. 

If Asia had a Panama Canal to dig, she would dig it with 
picks, hoes, and spades and tote out the earth in buckets. 
Nothing but human bone and sinew would be employed, and 
the men would be paid Httle, because without tools and knowl- 
edge they must always earn little. But America puts brains, 
science, steam, electricity, machinery into the Big Ditch — Tools 
and Knowledge, in other words — and she pays good wages 
because a man thus equipped does the work of ten men whose 
only force is the force of muscle. 

But Asia — deluded, foolish Asia — has scorned machinery. 
"The more work machinery does, the less there will be for 
human beings to do. Men will be without work, and men with- 
out work will starve." With this folly on her lips she has re- 
jected the agencies that would have rescued her from her never- 
ending struggle with starvation. 

Oftentimes, we know, the same cry has been heard in Eng- 
land — and alas! even in America; our labor unions even now 
sometimes lend a willing ear to such nonsense. There were 
riots in England when manufacturers sought to introduce 
labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and when railroads 
were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands of 
draymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared, 
would have torn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers, 
as the Chinese did along the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the 
same feeling the old-time hand compositors looked upon the 
coming of the typesetting machine. 

And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of 
draymen and cabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the 



180 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

work of hundreds of thousands of weavers and spinners, with 
all our telegraphs and telephones taking the place of number- 
less messengers, runners, and errand boys, and with a pop- 
ulation, too, vastly in excess of the population when old- 
fashioned methods prevailed, the fact stands out that labor 
has never been in greater demand and has never commanded 
higher wages than to-day. 

With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that 
it must ever be so — certainly as far ahead as we can look into 
the future. When a machine is invented which enables one 
man to do the work it formerly required two men to do in pro- 
ducing some sheer necessity for mankind, an extra man is 
released or freed to serve mankind by the production of some 
comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the things of the mind 
and the spirit. 

And it is the duty of society and government, it may be 
said just here, to facilitate this result, to provide education and 
equality of opportunity so that each man will work where his 
effort will mean most in human service. Knowledge or educa- 
tion not only cuts the shackles which chain a man down to a 
few occupations, not only sets him free to labor where he can 
work best, but is also itself a productive agency — a tool with 
which a man may work better. 

Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the 
air: a man may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it 
to work, and get results, profits, power, from it, as surely as 
from a harnessed horse or steam engine. And so with every 
other useful bit of knowledge under heaven. Knowledge is 
power. 

All this doctrine Asia has rejected, or has never even got to 
the point of considering. In America a motorman or con- 
ductor by means of tools and knowledge — a street-car for 
a tool and the science of electricity for knowledge — transports 
forty people from one place to another. These men are high- 
priced laborers considered from an Oriental standpoint and yet 




SOCIETY BELLES OF MINDANAO, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS 



WWW&T 





A STREET SCENE IN MANILA 





TWO KINDS OF WORKERS IN BURMA 
One of the pleasures of being "on the road to Mandalay" was to see the — 
"Elephints a-pilin' teak 
In the sludgy, squd^y creek " 
The elephants of Rangoon are as fascinating as the camels of Peking. But 
one never gets hardened to the every-day Oriental spectacle of human beings 
harnessed like oxen to weary burdens, many of which make those in the lower 
picture look light by comparison 



ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 183 

it costs you only five cents for your ride, and five minutes' 
time. In Peking, on the other hand, it takes forty men pulling 
rickshaws to transport the forty passengers; and though the 
pullers are "cheap laborers," it costs you more money and an 
hour's time to get to your destination — even if you are so 
lucky as not to be taken to the wrong place. 

Forty men to do the work that two would do at home! 
Men and women weavers doing work that machines would do 
at home. Grain reaped with sickles instead of with horses 
and reapers as in America. Sixteen men at Hankow to carry 
baggage that one man and a one-horse dray would carry in 
New York. Women carrying brick, stone, and timber up 
the mountainside at Hong Kong — and the Chinese threat- 
ened a general riot when the English built a cable-car system 
up the incline; they compelled the owners to sign an agree- 
ment to transport passengers only — never freight! No saw- 
mills in the Orient, but thousands of men laboriously convert- 
ing logs into lumber by means of whipsaws. No pumps, even 
at the most used watering places, but buckets and ropes: 
often no windlass. No power grain-mills, but men and women, 
and, in some cases, asses and oxen, doing the work that the 
idle water-powers are given no chance to do. 

These are but specimen illustrations. In the few industries 
where machinery and knowledge are brought into play ordinary 
labor is as yet but little better paid than in other lines because 
such industries are not numerous enough to affect the general 
level of wages. The net result of her policy of refusing the help 
of machinery is that Asia has not doubled a man's chances for 
work, but she has more than halved the pay he gets for that 
work. And why? Because she has reduced his efficiency. 
A man must get his proportion of the common wealth, and 
where the masses are shackled, hampered by ignorance and 
poor tools, they produce little, and each man's share is little. 

Suppose you are a merchant: what sort of trade could you 
hope for among a people who earn 10 cents a day — the head 



184 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKTNG UP 

of a family getting half enough to buy a single meal in a 
second-rate restaurant? Or if you are a banker, what sort of 
deposits could you get among such a people? Or if a railroad 
man, how much traffic? Or if a manufacturer, how much 
business? Or if a newspaper man, how much circulation? 
Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how much income? 
Very plain on the whole must be my two propositions: 

(1) That the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer 
well-to-do, because the Asiatic earns little, the American 
much — a condition due to the fact that the American doubles, 
trebles, or quadruples his productive capacity, his earning 
power, by the use of tools and knowledge, machinery and 
education. The Oriental does not. 

(2) Your prosperity, in whatever measure you have it; 
the fact that your labor earns two, three, or ten times what 
you would get for it if you had been born in Asia: this is due 
in the main, not to your personal merit, but to your racial 
inheritance, to the fact that you were born among a people 
who have developed an industrial order, have provided edu- 
cation and machinery, tools and knowledge, in such manner 
that your services to society are worth several times as much as 
would be the case if you were in the Orient, where education 
has never reached the common people. 

Pity — may God pity ! — the man who fancies he owes 
nothing to the school, who pays his tax for education grudg- 
ingly as if it were a charity — as if he had only himself to 
thank for the property on which the government levies a 
pitiable mill or so for the advancement and diffusion of knowl- 
edge among mankind. Pity him if he has not considered; 
pity him the more if, having considered, he is small enough of 
soul to repudiate the debt he owes the race. But for what 
education has brought us from all its past, but for what it 
has wrought through the invention of better tools and the 
better management (through increased knowledge) of all the 
powers with which men labor, our close-fisted, short-sightad 



ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA 185 

taxpayer would himself be living in a shelter of brush, shoot- 
ing game with a bow and arrow, cultivating com with a crooked 
stick! Most of what he has he owes to his racial heritage; 
it is only because other men prosper that he prospers. And 
yet owing so much to the Past, he would do nothing for the 
Future; owing so much to the progress the race has made, he 
would do nothing to insure a continuance of that progress. 

"Line upon line; precept upon precept." At the risk of 
possible redundancy, therefore, let me conclude by repeating: 
Whatever prosperity you enjoy is largely due to what pre- 
vious generations have done for increasing man's efficiency 
by means of knowledge and tools; your first duty to your 
fellows is to help forward the same agencies for human uplift 
in the future. And while this is the first duty of the individual, 
it is even more emphatically the first duty of a community 
or a commonwealth. 

This is Asia's most important lesson for America. 

Singapore, Straits Settlements. 



XIX 

THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 

THE Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in 
the dead of winter, and yet with no suggestion of 
snow, bare fields, or leafless trees. The luxuriant 
green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and 
in Singapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator, 
summer and winter are practically ahke. 

"But you must remember that we are here in the winter- 
time," a fellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed 
his surprise at not finding it hotter than it really was — the 
speaker evidently forgetting that at the equator December is 
as much a summer month as July, and immediately south 
of it what are the hot months with us become the winter 
months there. And Singapore is so close to the equator that 
for it "all seasons are summer," and the punkah wallas (the 
coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are made 
tolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the 
Fourth of July. 

The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers 
on the tropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoa- 
nut palms are silhouetted against the sky in all directions; 
the dense, heavy foliage of the banana trees is seen on almost 
every street; the sprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion 
of roots and branches, casts its dense shadows on the grateful 
earth; and all around the city are rubber plantations, immense 
pineapple fields, and uncleared jungle-land in which wild 
beasts and poisonous serpents carry on the unending life-and- 

186 



STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 187 

death struggle between the strong and the weak. Singapore, 
in fact, is said to have been called "the Lion City" for a long 
while because of the great number of lions found in the neigh- 
borhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed near- 
by, and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long. 

There is probably no place on earth in which there have 
been brought together greater varieties of the human species 
than in Singapore. I was told that sixty languages are spoken 
in the city, and if diversity of color may be taken as an indica- 
tion of diversity of language, I am prepared to believe it. 
There are many Indians or Hindus, most of them about as 
black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasian 
in the main — sharp noses, thin lips, and straight glossy black 
hair; but 72 per cent, of the population of Singapore is 
Chinese. 

It is interesting to observe that John Chinaman seems to 
flourish equally in the Tropics and in the Temperate Zone. 
Here in Singapore under an equatorial sun, or in Canton on 
the edge of the Tropics, he seems as energetic, as unfailing in 
industry, as he is in wintry Mukden or northern Mongolia. 
For hours after sunset many of the Chinese shops in Singapore 
present as busy an appearance as at mid-day, and the pig- 
tailed rickshaw men, with only a loin-cloth about their bare 
bodies, seem to run as fast and as far as they would if they 
were in Peking. 

The Chinese are a wonderful people, and I am more and 
more impressed with the thought of what a hand they are to 
have in the world's affairs a hundred years hence when they 
get thoroughly "waked up." They were first brought to 
Singapore, I understand, as common laborers, but now their 
descendants are among the wealthiest men and women in the 
place and ride around in automobiles, while descendants of 
their one-time employers walk humbly on the adjacent side- 
walks. It is a tribute to the untiring industry, shrewdness, and 
business skill of the Chinaman that nowadays when people 



188 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

anywhere speak of desiring Celestials as laborers, they add, 
"Provided they are under contract to return to China when 
the work is finished, and do not remain to absorb the trade 
and wealth of the country." 

From Singapore we made a very interesting trip to Johore, 
a little kingdom about the size of ten ordinary counties, and 
with a population of about 350,000. The soil and climate 
along the route are well suited to the cultivation of rubber 
trees, and considerable areas have recently been cleared of the 
dense jungle growth and set to young rubber plants. One of 
my friends who has a rubber plantation north of Singapore 
says that while rubber is selling now at only $1.50 a pound as 
compared with $3 a pound a few months ago, there are still 
enormous profits in the business, as the rubber should not 
cost over 25 cents a pound to produce. Some of the older 
plantations paid dividends of 150 per cent, last year, and prob- 
ably set aside something for a rainy day in addition. 

Yet not even these facts would have justified the wild spec- 
ulation in rubber, the unreasoning inflation in values, which 
proved a veritable "Mississippi Bubble" for so many investors 
in Europe and Asia last year. Shares worth $5 or $10 were 
grabbed by eager buyers at $100 each. I know of a specific 
instance where a plantation bought for $16,000 was capi- 
talized at $230,000, or 20 for 1, and the stock floated. When 
the madness had finally spent itself and people began to see 
things as they were, not only individuals, but whole commun- 
ities, found themselves prostrated. Shanghai will not recover 
for years, and some of its citizens — the young fellow with a 
$1500 income who incurred a $30,000 debt in the scramble, 
for example — are left in practical bondage for life as a result. 
The men who have gone into the rubber-growing industry on 
a strictly business basis, however, are likely to find it profit- 
able for a long time to come. 

The cocoanut industry is also a profitable one, although 
the modest average of 10 per cent., year in and year out, has 



STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 189 

not appealed to those who have been indulging in pipe dreams 
about rubber. Where transportation facilities are good, the 
profits from cocoanuts probably average considerably in excess 
of 10 per cent., for the trees require little care, and it is easy 
for the owners to sell the product without going to any trouble 
themselves. In one section of the Philippines, I know, the 
Chinese pay one peso (50 cents gold) a tree for the nuts and 
pick them themselves. And when we consider the great 
nmnber of the slim-bodied trees that may grow upon an acre, 
it is not surprising to hear that many owners of cocoanut 
groves or plantations live in Europe on the income from the 
groves, going to no trouble whatever except to have the trees 
counted once a year. 

Penang, where we spent only a day, is almost literally in 
the midst of an immense cocoanut plantation, and I was much 
interested in seeing the half-naked Hindus gathering the 
unhusked fruit for shipment. The tall, limbless trunks of 
the trees, surmounted only by a top-knot of fruit and foliage, 
are in nearly every case gapped and notched at intervals of 
about three feet to furnish toe-hold for the natives in climbing. 

After tiiEBn on this winter day, instead of putting on gloves 
and overcoats, we went out on a grassy lawn, clad in linen and 
pongee as we were, and luxuriated in the cool shade of the palm 
trees. The dense foliage of the tropical jungle was in sight 
from our place by the seaside, and in the garden not far away 
were cinnamon trees, cloves, orchids, rubber trees, the poi- 
sonous upas, and palms of all varieties known. 

Penang is a rather important commercial centre, and ex- 
ports more tin than any other place on earth. The metal is 
shipped in molten bars like lead or pig iron, and to one who has 
associated tin only with light buckets, cups, and dippers, it 
is surprising how much strength it takes to move a bar of the 
solid metal the size of a small watermelon. 

The imports of Penang are also not inconsiderable, and in 
walking through the warehouses along the wharves I was 



190 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

struck by the number of boxes, crates, bales, and bundles bear- 
ing the legend, "Made in Germany." The Germans are to- 
day the most aggressive commercial nation on earth, and 
I find that their government and their business houses are 
searching every nook and corner of the globe for trade openings. 
Unlike our American manufacturers, it may be observed just 
here, they are quick to change the style of their goods to meet 
even what they may regard as the whims of their customers, 
and this is an advantage of no small importance. If a manu- 
facturer wishes to sell plows in the Philippines, for example, 
it would not be worth while for him to try to sell the thor- 
oughly modem two-handled American kind to begin with. 
He should manufacture an improved one-handled sort at first 
and try gradually to make the natives see the advantages of 
using two handles. At present, as an American said to me in 
Manila, if you should seek to sell a Filipino a two-handled 
plow he would probably say that two handles may be all 
right for Americans who are not expert at plowing, but that 
the Filipino has passed that stage! 

I mention this only by way of illustrating the necessity of 
respecting the custombrey or custom, of the country. The 
Germans realize this, and we do not. 

One day by steamer from Penang brought us to Rangoon, 
the capital and most important city in Burma, and (next to 
Bombay and Calcutta) the most important in British India. 
We had heard much of the place, situated thirty miles up the 
river "on the road to Mandalay," but found that even then 
the half had not been told. If there were nothing else to see 
but the people on the streets, a visit to Rangoon would be 
memorable, for nowhere else on earth perhaps is there such 
butterfly-like gorgeousness and gaudiness of raiment. At a 
little distance you might mistake a crowd for an enormous 
flower-bed. All around you are men and women wearing 
robes that rival in brilliancy Joseph's coat of many colors. 

The varieties in form of clothing are as great as the varieties 



STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 191 

in hue. The Burmese babies toddle about in beauty unadorned, 
and for the grown-ups there is every conceivable sort of ap- 
parel — or the lack of it. Most of the laborers on the streets 
wear only a loin-cloth and a turban (with the addition of a 
caste-mark on the forehead in case they are Hindus), but 
others have loose-fitting red, green, yellow, blue, striped, 
ring-streaked or rainbow-hued wraps, robes, shirts or trousers: 
and the women, of course, affect an equal variety of colors. 

"The whackin' white cheroot" that the girl smoked in Kip- 
ling's "Road to Mandalay" is also much in evidence here; or 
perhaps instead of the white cheroot it is an enormous black 
cigar. In either case it is as large as a medium-sized corncob, 
that the newly landed tourist is moved to stare thereat in 
open-eyed amazement. How do Kipling's verses go? 

" 'Er petticoat was yaller, an' 'er little cap was green. 

An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen, 

An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot. 

An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot." 

They are all there in Rangoon yet — the gorgeous coloring 
of the lady's raiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols — 

"Bloomin' idol made o' mud. 
Wot they called the Great Gawd Bud." 

How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would 
be impossible to estimate — I saw them not only in the pagodas, 
but newly carved in the shops which supply the Buddhist 
temples in the interior — and the gilded dome of the Shwe 
Dagon Pagoda, "the most celebrated shrine of the entire 
Buddhist world," glitters like a beacon for miles before you 
reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the Washing- 
ton Monument, it is gilded from top to bottom — with actual 
gold leaf, Rangoon citizens claim — and around it are innu- 
merable smaller pagodas and shrines glittering with mosaics 
of colored glass in imitation of all the gems known to mortals. 



192 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Studied closely, they appear unduly gaudy, of course, but 
your first impression is that you have found a real Aladdin's 
palace, a dazzling, glittering dream of Oriental splendor and 
magnificence. To these shrines there come to-day, as there 
have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims 
from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pil- 
grims not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, 
and Korea. I shall not soon forget the feeble looks of the old 
white-haired pilgrim whom two women were helping up the 
steep ascent as I left the Pagoda after my second visit there. 
I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all the millions to 
whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia," that it is a 
religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies 
of Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about 
the Shwe Dagon present at least some faint idea of a God who 
tempers justice with mercy and made human life good rather 
than a God of cruelty who made life a curse and a mockery. 
Every traveller who sees Buddhist Burma after having seen 
Hindu India comments on the greater cheerfulness and hope- 
fulness of the Burman people, and especially the happier lives 
of the women — all a result, in the main, of the difference 
in religion. 

And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable 
enough — its temples infested by fortune-tellers, witches, 
and fakirs, its faith mingled with gross superstitions and charms 
to propitiate the "nats" or spirits which are supposed to in- 
habit streams, forests, villages, houses, etc., and to have in- 
finite power over the lives and fortunes of the people. A 
common sight on the morning streets is a group of yellow-robed 
priests with their begging bowls, into which pious Buddhists 
put food and other offerings; without these voluntary offer- 
ings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma, 
as in Siam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a 
few days and get his living in this way. 

The ordinary beast of burden in Rangoon is the Indian bul'* 



STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 198 

lock. Often pure white, usually with a well-kept appearance 
and with a clean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he 
should be on the way to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about 
his head. Teams of black Hindus, three quarters naked, 
are also seen pulling heavy carts and drays; and it may be that 
the small boys utilize the long-eared goats (they have heavy, 
drooping ears like a foxhound's) to pull their small carts, 
but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city that 
interested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the ele- 
phants of Rangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of 
Peking in my memory and affection. Of course, the elephants 
of Rangoon are not so numerous as are the camels in China's 
capital, but those that one sees display an intelligence and 
certain human-like qualities that make them fascinating. 

One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co.'s 
lumber yard at Ahloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained 
elephants there handle the heavy saw-logs which it is neces- 
sary to move from place to place. It was better than a 
circus. 

" Elephants a-pilin' teak 
In the sludgy, squdgy creek." 

It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other 
beings in the Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. 
What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with 
infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between 
tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long 
and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the 
mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down 
on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, 
and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he 
"cussed" in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a 
magnificent tusker, pushed the logs with his snout and tusks, 
while the others pulled them with chains. But the most 
marvellous thing is how the barefooted, half -naked driver, or 
mahout, astride the great giant's shoulders, makes him under- 



194 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

stand what to do in each case by merely kicking his neck or 
prodding his ears. 

At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna 
got his log stuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring pro- 
fanely about his trials, when the tusker's mahout bid that 
royal beast go help his troubled brother. Straightway, there- 
fore, went the tusker, leaving great holes in the mud at each 
footprint as if a tree had been uprooted there, gave a mighty 
shove to the recalcitrant log, and there was peace again in 
the camp. 

For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any 
ordinary sized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if 
it were a piece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in 
piling heavy plank he is remarkably careful about matching. 
Eying the pile at a distance, he looks to see if it is uneven or 
any single piece out of place, in which case he is quick to make 
it right. The young lady in our party was also much amused 
when the mahout called out, "Salaam to memsahib" ("Salute 
the lady"), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation as 
gracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit. 

One of my fellow-passengers, a rubber planter from the 
Straits Settlements, has worked elephants, has used them on 
the plantation and as help in building bridges, and has told me 
some interesting stories concerning them. He had two — 
one a tusker worth 2500 rupees, or $833 1-3, and the other a 
mutna (without tusks) worth 2250 rupees, or $750. On one 
occasion the mutna heard "the call of the wild," and went 
back to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren 
didn't like the civilized ways he brought back with him, for 
when he returned home later two thirds of his tail had been 
pulled off, and he bore other marks of struggle on his body. 
The tusker on one occasion ran mad (as they will do now and 
then) and killed one of his keepers. 

I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is 
caught. Driven into a stockade, the tamed elephants close in 



STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 195 

on hinij and the mahouts get him well chained before he 
knows what has happened. For a day or two he remains 
in enforced bondage, then two or three of the great tamed 
creatures take him out for a walk or down to the river where 
he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts 
set about taming him — talk to him in the affectionate, sooth- 
ing, half hypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in 
his stories, and stroke his trunk from discreet but gradually 
lessening distances. In a couple of months "my lord the 
Elephant" is fully civilised, responds promptly to the sug- 
gestions of his mahout, and a httle later adopts some useful 
occiipation. 

In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the im- 
mense rafts of teak trees that are floated down the rivers for 
export. My friend the rubber planter has also had one or two 
good travelling elephants on which he used to travel through 
the jungle from one plantation to the other, a distance of 
twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion he has run 
into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On good 
roads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make 
seven miles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which, 
however, they are likely to lose if set to heavy work. 

Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the 
great quantity of food required to keep him going. Eight 
hundred pounds a day will barely "jestify his stummuck," 
as Uncle Remus would say, and when he gets hungry "he 
wants what he wants when he wants it," and trumpets thun- 
derously till he gets it. The skipper on a Singapore-Rangoon 
steamer told of having had a dozen or more on board a few 
months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they 
waxed mutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear 
the whole vessel to pieces, when the ship fortunately came near 
enough to land to enable the officers to signal for a few tons 
of feed to be brought aboard for the elephants' breakfast. 

I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon 



196 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an or- 
phan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast 
as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy- 
guide in question assured me that he will turn white by the 
time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interest- 
ing if true, but I fear it isn't. 

I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude 
my impression of Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the 
lighter-skinned and lighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather 
notably with the dark and serious Hindus. Many of the Hin- 
dus are in Burma only temporarily. One ship that I saw com- 
ing into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India, was liter- 
ally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They will 
work through the Burman rice harvest — rice is the one great 
crop of the country — at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents) 
a day, and after three or four months of this will return home. 
Because they are so poor at home the steamship charges only 
ten rupees ($3) for bringing them to Rangoon, but requires 
fifteen rupees for carrying them back. 

Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed 
me very much in Rangoon: the graves of the English officers 
who were killed in the war with the Burmans many years ago, 
and are now buried within the walls of the picturesque old 
Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sun never sets on the 
English flag; and one finds much to remind him, too, that the sun 
never sets on the graves of that flag's defenders. Scattered 
through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands 
of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Near- 
by the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on 
the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the 
tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River 
breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And 
then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone — more 
refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate ever 
knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how 



STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA 197 

it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whis- 
pered among the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great 
blades of the bananas welcomed it! 

With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if 
of Araby the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our 
leave of Burma. 

Rangoon, Burma. 



XX 

HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 

P IT were any other country but India, I might write last 
of the religion the people profess, but, since it is 
India, it is the first thing to be considered. Religion is 
the supreme fact of Indian life — if we may call 
religion what has been more properly defined as "a sacred 
disease." 

Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where 
the entire life of the people is so molded by their spiritual 
beliefs. Two children are born the same day. The one, of 
high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed 
shall be all his life, no matter how stupid or vicious, a privi- 
leged and "superior" being, to whom all lower orders must 
make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and mother, 
Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how 
great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere 
touch works pollution worse than crime. And through the 
lifetime of each, Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme 
religion of India is called, will exercise over him an influence 
more potent and incessant than any civil government has ever 
exercised over its subjects. 

About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admit- 
tedly a certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this 
from Hindu literature one must wade through cesspools of filth 
and obscenity and must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of 
Deity, while in its practical manifestations modem Hinduism is 
the most sickening combination of superstition, idolatry, and 

198 



HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 199 

vice that now disgraces the name of religion in any considerable 
portion of the earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, 
"Samsara," the belief that you have had millions of births 
(as men and animals) and may have millions more (unless you 
earlier merit the favor of the gods and win release from life), 
and that what you are in your present life is the result of actions 
in previous existence, and what you do in this present existence 
will influence all your future rebirths — this is a doctrine that 
might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with such 
ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical Hin- 
duism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on 
exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, 
but on rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid ob- 
servance of caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper 
sacrifices to fickle or bloodthirsty gods and goddesses. In 
their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest 
against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that God 
can be worshipped only in spirit. 

Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an 
Emanation of God, a part of the Divine Essence, and the 
purpose of man's existence to hasten a final absorption into 
God -^ this also (although destructive of the idea of individ- 
uality, the sacredness of personality, so fundamental in Chris- 
tian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral force, 
but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Sam- 
sara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu 
gods themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, 
obscene and criminal. 

Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its phi- 
losophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the 
Higher Hinduism "powerless to be born," is only the illusion 
which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism 
hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands 
of the sea for multitude. If all the human race alive to-day 
were to pass in review before you, every eighth person in the 



200 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hin- 
duism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to 
visit some of their most celebrated temples. 

It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the 
first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat 
in Calcutta. This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother 
Kali," as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted 
me always said, the bloody goddess of destruction. That ter- 
rible society of criminals and assassins, the Thugs (its founder 
is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron goddess and 
whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before 
her image: all this in a "temple" of "religion." 

The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is 
in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue 
lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, 
bloody head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the 
heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead 
men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and 
each man who comes to worship her brings a little wet, trembling 
kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done 
its work is supposed to please the terrible goddess. The morn- 
ing of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on 
the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place runs ankle- 
deep in blood. 

In the old days — and not so long ago at that — there were 
human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest 
concerning them, his significant answer was that the British 
Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim 
that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kalihi Purana says 
that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years, 
and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head bedecked 
with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many 
years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice 
has been attempted within a decade. 

From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me 



HINDUISM— AND THE HIMALAYAS 201 

to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the 
Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable 
pilgrims were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" 
with the gods. On the way we passed the image of Jugger- 
naut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims 
are lodged, and the image of Setola, "the Mother of the Small- 
pox," as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come 
for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest assured me that 
if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth 
2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, 
bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" 
and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming 
— and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to 
lend his assistance — there ensued such a Kilkenny fight be- 
tween the priests and the dense mob of "worshippers," such 
knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for 
the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I 
got a swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head. 

Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest 
(like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for 
"more") I went back to my hotel, properly edified, let us 
believe, by this spectacle of Hindu "religion." 

It was Sunday morning. 

Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went 
that afternoon to another Indian religious service — this time 
of Christians — and compared it with what I had seen in the 
morning? Instead of a money -hunting priest sitting beside 
a butcher's block and exacting a prescribed fee from each 
pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty goddess, her- 
self only one of the many jealous gods and goddesses to be 
favored and propitiated — instead of this there was a converted 
Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whose charac- 
teristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. And instead 
of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the fine 
rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily rec- 



202 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

ognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words 
into the strange tongue of the Bengali. 

At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being 
flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observ- 
ant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through 
Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is 
the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as 
compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in 
Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives even of 
those of 

"Deaf ear and soul uncaring" 

who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no 
desire to preach, I set down these things, simply because they 
are as obvious as temples or scenery to any Oriental traveller 
who travels with open eyes and open mind. 

But let us now go to Benares, the fountain-head of the Hindu 
faith, the city which is to it what Mecca is to Mohammedanism 
and more than Jerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares 
is so important that I must give more than a aragraph to 
my impressions of it. 

The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I found 
surprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many- 
storied pilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious 
to win the favor of the gods, tower like mountains from the 
river bank. A strange mingling of many styles and epochs 
of Oriental architecture are they, and yet mainly suggestive of 
the palaces and temples that lined the ancient Nile. An earth- 
quake, too, has heightened the effect by leaving massive ruins, 
the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem to whisper 
tales even older than any building now standing in Benares. 
For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was 
old when the walls of Rome were built; it was historic when 
David sat on the throne of Israel. 

But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly 



HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 203 

unlike these beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth 
may one see crowds like these — crowds that overflow the 
acres and acres of stone steps leading up from the river's edge 
through the maze of buildings and spill off into the water. 
There are indeed all sorts and conditions of men and women. 
Princes come from afar with their gorgeous retinues and stately 
equipages, and go down into the bathing-places calling on the 
names of their gods as trustingly as the poor doomed leper who 
thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring the hoped- 
for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose 
faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own house- 
holds — they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to 
be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained, 
man-borne palki and are taken within boats with closed sides, 
where they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and 
women, old and young, high and low (except the outcasts) 
— all come. There are once-brown Hindus with their skins 
turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with limbs swollen 
to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men 
and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or 
that impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which 
is the nearest Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by 
dying in the sacred place. 

A great many pilgrims — may God have pity, as He will, 
on their poor untutored souls — die in despair, worn out by 
weakness and disease, ere they reach Benares with its Balm of 
Gilead which they seek; but many other aged or afflicted ones 
die happier for the knowledge that they have reached their 
Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick work of the 
morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the 
Ganges. "Rama, nama, satya hai" (The name of Rama is true) : 
so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid 
red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are 
used. The body is wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a 
woman's, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before break- 



204 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

fast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body has 
converted into a handful of ashes that which was a breathing 
human being when the sun set the day before. 

Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief 
that accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners 
are sometimes hired — for one anna a Hindu can get a pro- 
fessional mourner to wail heart-breakingly at the funeral of 
his least-loved mother-in-law — but somehow the relatives of 
the dead themselves seem to show little evidence of grief. 
"But where are the bereaved families.'*" I asked a Hindu priest 
as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and 
talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor 
of burning human flesh. "Oh, those are the families you see 
there," he replied. And sure enough they were — I suppose 
— although I had thought them only the persons hired to 
help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the funerals 
occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the 
cremation is concluded it is the son's duty — in some places 
I visited, at least — to take a big stick and crack the skull 
in order to release his father's spirit! 

But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why 
should the Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his 
theology, is itself a curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul 
running its course through the bodies of beasts and men, the 
ultimate good, the greatest boon to be won from the propiti- 
ated gods, is "remerging in the general soul," the Escape from 
Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and Self; not An- 
nihilation itself but the Anniliilation of Personality, of that 
sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement 
in human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that 
you are a son of God and that you will maintain a separate, 
conscious, responsible identity throughout eternity, Hinduism 
teaches that your spirit is a part of the Divine and will ulti- 
mately be reabsorbed into it. Its doctrine in this respect is 
much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably neither religion 




TYPES AT DARJEELING, NORTHERN INDIA, AND AT DELHI, 

CENTRAL INDIA 

India has not a homogeneous population. There are almost as many races, 

types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The right-hand figure in the 

upper picture bears a striking resemblance to a North American Indian. 

The instrument in his hands is a praying-wheel 




TWO RANGOON TiPi^s 
Swpi-yaw-lat and her " ivhackin' ichite A Hindu girl 

cheroot " 
Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one iie<.'J 
not go far to find the Burmese girl KipHng has immortalized: 
"'Er petticoat was yaller and "er little cap was green, 

An er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen — 
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cherout. 
An' a wastin' Christian kisses on a "eathen idols foot'" 



HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 207 

lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of the indi- 
vidual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian civili- 
zation, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic 
of the social and political institutions of the Orient. 

But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do 
not all die, nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred 
waters of "Mother Gunga," as the Ganges is called. Naturally 
there are many temples in which they must worship, many 
priests whom they must support. There are said to be 2000 
temples in Benares and the high priest of one of them — while 
sparring for a bigger tip for his services — told me that he was 
at the head of 400 priests supported by his establishment 
alone (the Golden Temple). 

And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side 
of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and ob- 
sceneness there are "temples" in Benares — so-called "temples" 
that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called 
"priests" to act as guides to their foulness — that could give 
lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the 
Government of India, when it made a law against indecent 
pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for 
Hindu " religious "(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, 
even to the endurance of the British Government, and at the 
Nepalese Temple I was told that the authorities do not allow 
such structures to be built now. Moreover, it is not only 
admitted that the temples in many parts of India are the 
resort of the lowest class of women, "temple girls" dedicated 
to gods and goddesses, but their oresence is openly defended 
as proper. 

Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanli- 
ness as they are from godliness. The Golden Temple with 
its sacred cows penned up in dirty stalls, its ragged half -naked 
worshippers, its holy cesspool known as "The Well of Knowl- 
edge," its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous em- 
blems of its lustful god Krishna, and its mercenary priests, 



^08 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

is a good illustration. And the famous Monkey Temple 
(dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more 
attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loath- 
some collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the mis- 
fortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the 
monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on 
the ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, 
won a place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their 
monkey companions. I left and went out to the gate where 
the snake-charmers were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. 
It was pleasanter to look at them. 

That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares, 
discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of 
Hindu religious theory, but what I had seen during the day 
did not help his argument. Emerson's phrase jnay well be 
applied to Hinduism, "What you are speaks so loud that 
I cannot hear what you say." 

Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply 
to get a better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in 
conclusion to a happier subject. Some days ago I went to 
Darjeeling on the boundary of northern India and on the edge 
of the great Himalaya mountain range. In sight from its 
streets and from nearby peaks are the highest mountains formed 
by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on which the 
eye of mortal man may ever rest. 

Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed 
horse and wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends 
on a foreign tour are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, 
from which point we looked across the boundaries of Tibet 
and saw the sun rise upon a view whose majesty defied descrip- 
tion. In the distance on our left there glittered in its mantle 
of everlasting snow, and with its twin attendants, the summit of 
Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest mountain on the 
surface of the earth. Even grander was the view directly in 
front of us, for there only one third as far away as Everest, royal 



HINDUISM — AND THE HIMALAYAS 209 

Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite 
masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread 
majesty toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad 
semicircle of kingly peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet 
risen to our view, colored the pure-white of its crest with 
a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or two had se 
the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues 
of its earliest rays. Across forty -five miles of massive 
chasms and rugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves 
perhaps as high as the highest Alps or Rockies) we looked 
to where, thousands of feet higher yet, there began the 
eternal snow-line of Xinchinjunga, above which its further 
bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling silhouette 
against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak 
and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the 
foot of Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitch- 
ells on top* of one another above its highest point — the mas- 
sive bulk in either case stretching thousands and thousands of 
feet above the line of everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga. 

Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a 
view it was not meet for any but the high gods themselves to 
see. About it all was a suggestion of illimitableness, of more 
than earthly majesty, of infinite serenity and measureless 
calm, which sat upon our spirits with a certain eerie unworldli- 
ness. 

It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I 
learned later that it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama 
Buddha dreamed his dream of the Nirvana and of its brooding 
and endless peace in which man's fretful spirit — 

"From too much love of living 
Brom hope and fear set free" — 

may find at last the rest that it has sought in vain through 
all our human realm of Time and Place. 
Lucknow, India. 




XXI 

"THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" 

REAT indeed are the uses of Poetry. Consider by way 
of illustration how accurately and comprehensively 
some forgotten bard in four short lines has pictured 
for us the true condition of the inhabitants of 
England's great Indian Empire: 

" The poor, benighted Hindu, 
He does the best he kin do 
He sticks to his caste from first to last. 
And for pants he makes his skin do." 

A Mr. Micawber might dilate at length upon how this achieve- 
ment in verse informs us (1) as to the financial condition of 
the people, to wit, they are "poor," the average annual income 
having been estimated at only $10, and the average wages for 
day labor in the capital city of India only 6 to 20 cents per 
diem; (2) as to their intellectual condition, "benighted," 
ninety men in each hundred being unable to read or write any 
language, while of every thousand Indian women 993 are to- 
tally illiterate; (3) as to the social system, each man living and 
dying within the limits of the caste into which he is born; and 
(4) as to the clothing, garb or dress of the inhabitants (or the 
absence thereof), the children of both sexes being frequently 
attired after the manner of our revered First Parents before they 
made the acquaintance of the fig tree, while the adults also 
dispense generally with trousers, shoes, and stockings, and 
other impedimenta of our over-developed civilization. 

210 



**THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" 211 

Great indeed are the uses of poetry. In all my letters from 
India I shall hardly be able to do more than expand and enlarge 
upon the great fundamental truths so eloquently set forth in 
our four-line poetry piece. 

If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the 
common people because he made so many of them," then the 
Creator must also have a special fondness for these "poor 
benighted Hindus/' for within an area less than half the 
size of the United States more than 300,000,000 of them live 
and move and have their being. That is to say, if the United 
States were as thickly populated as India, it would contain 
600,000,000 people. It is also said that when the far-flung 
battle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expan- 
sion that great empire had within its borders only half as many 
people as there are in India to-day. India and its next-door 
neighbor, China, contain half the population of the whole 
earth. In other words, if the Chinese and East Indians were 
the equals of the other races in military prowess the combined 
armies of all other nations on the globe, of every nation in 
Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, 
the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would be required 
to defeat them. 

Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family 
calls for special study. And if we would study them we must 
not confine ourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India, 
interesting as these cities are. 

The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of 
the people live on the soil) is not the trader, a city -dweller in 
these few large centres of population, but the ryot, or farmer, 
in the thousands and thousands of little mud-house villages 
between the Himalaya slopes and Cape Comorin. The signifi- 
cant economic fact in India is not the millions of dollars once 
spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30 spent in building this 
average peasant's home or hut. The significant social fact is 
not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modern Rajah 



212 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

©stimated in lakhs of rupees^ but the five or six cents a day 
which is a laborer's wage for millions and millions of the people. 

For these reasons I have been no more interested in the 
famous cities I have seen than in the little rural villages whose 
names may have never found place in an English book. Let 
us get, if we can, a pen picture of one of these villages in north 
central India. 

As I approached it from a distance it looked Hke an enormous 
mass of ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as 
has been suggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and 
are often roofed with clay also — made flat on top with a little 
trench or gutter for drainage. Perhaps the majority, however, 
have thick sloping roofs of straw, the eaves being hardly as 
high as a man's head. Very thick are the mud walls of the 
houses, eighteen inches or more in most cases, and as the floor 
is also the bare earth, there is no woodwork about such a dwell- 
ing except the doors and a few poles to hold up the roof. In 
one or two small rooms of this kind without a window or chim- 
ney (oftener perhaps in one room than in two) a whole family 
lives, cooks, and sleeps. 

The streets, if such they may be called, are often little more 
than crooked water-rutted paths, so narrow that one may reach 
from the mud walls of the houses on one side to the mud walls 
on the other, and so crooked that you are likely to meet your- 
self coming back before you get to the end. Or perhaps you 
wind up unexpectedly in some mahullah — a group of huts 
representing several families of kinsfolk. Enclosed by a mud 
wall, the little brown bright-eyed, black-haired, half-naked 
children are playing together in the little opening around which 
the houses are bunched, and the barefooted mothers are cooking 
chapaiis, spinning cotton on knee-high spinning wheels, weaving 
in some wonderfully primitive way, gathering fuel, or are en- 
gaged in other household tasks. The equipment of one of 
these human ant-hills, called a home, is about as primitive as 
the building itself. There is, of course, a bed or cot: it is about 




A HINDU FAQUIR 




SOME FASHIONABLE HINDUS 

The faquirs do not like to be photographed, and this fellow in the upper 
picture was snapped just in the act of rising from his bed of spikes. This is 
only one of many methods of self-torture practised in the hope of winning 
the favor of the gods 




HINDU CHILDREN — NOTICE THE FOREHEAD CASTE MARKS 



"THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" 215 

half knee-high, and the heavy twine or light rope knitted to- 
gether after the fashion of a very coarse fish-net is the only 
mattress. The coarse grain which serves for food is stored in 
jars; the meagre supply of clothing hangs in one corner of the 
room; there are no chairs, knives or forks. The stove or fire- 
place is a sort of small clay box for the fire, with an opening 
on top for the kettle or oven. In one corner of the room is 
the fuel: a few small sticks and dried refuse from cow stalls 
that Americans use for fertilizing their fields. "We have 
found rather bad results," a missionary told me, "from provid- 
ing Indian girls with mattresses, chairs, knives, forks, etc., at our 
mission schools. Later, when they marry our native workers, 
the $5-a-month income of the family (which is about all they 
can expect) is insufficient to provide these luxuries, and the 
girl's recollections of former comforts are likely to prove a 
source of dissatisfaction to her." 

At first you ask, "But why are there no windows in the 
houses? Surely the people could leave openings in the clay walls 
that would give light and ventilation .f*" The answer is that 
most of the year the weather is so hot that the hope of the owner 
is to get as nearly cave-like conditions as possible; to find, as 
it were, a cool place in the earth, untouched by the fiery glare 
of the burning sun outside. Even in north central India in 
the houses of the white men, where everything has been done to 
reduce the temperature and with every punkah-fan swinging 
the room's length to make a breeze, the temperature in May and 
June is 106 or higher, and at midnight in the open air the ther- 
mometer may reach 105. "It is then no uncommon thing," 
a friend in Agra told me, " to find even natives struck down dead 
by the roadside; and the railways have men designated to take 
and burn the bodies of those who succumb to the heat in travel 
by the cars." 

In such a warm climate the dress of the people, as has already 
been suggested, is not very elaborate. In fact, the garb of 
the adult man is likely to be somewhat like the uniform of the 



216 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Gunga Din (the Indian bhisti or water-carrier for the British 

regiment) : 

" The uniform 'e wore 
Was nothin' much before 
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'md — 
For a twisty piece o' rag 
And a goatskin water-bag 
Was all the field equipment 'e could find." 

In cold weather, however, the majority of the men are rather 
fully covered, and in any case they add a turban or cap of 
some gaudy hue to the uniform just suggested. 

As for the dress of the women, a typical woman's outfit 
will consist of, say, a crimson skirt with a green border, a navy- 
blue piece of cloth as large as a sheet draped loosely (and quite 
incompletely) around the head and upper part of the body, 
and a breast-cloth or possibly a waist of brilliant yellow. This 
combination of hues, of course, is only a specimen. The actual 
colors are variable but the brilliancy is invariable. 

Furthermore, the celebrated Old Lady of Banbury Cross, who 
boasted of rings, on her fingers and bells on her toes, would find 
her glory vanish in a twinkling should she visit India. Not 
content with these preliminary beginnings of adornment, the 
barefooted Hindu woman wears — if she can afford it — a 
band or two of anklets, bracelets halfway from wrist to elbow, 
armlets beyond the elbow, ear-rings of immense size, a neck- 
lace or two, toe-rings and a bejewelled nose-ring as big around 
as a turnip. Sometimes the jewelry on a woman's feet will 
rattle as she walks like the trace-chains on a plow-horse on 
the way to the barn. 

This barbaric display of jewelry, it should be said, is not 
made solely for purposes of show. The truth is that the native 
has not grown used to the idea of savings banks (although the 
government is now gradually convincing him that the postal 
savings institutions are safe), and when he earns a spare rupee 
he puts it into jewelry to adorn the person of himself or 



"THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" 217 

hii wife. If all tlie idle treasures which the poor of India 
now carry on their legs, arms, ears, and noses were put into 
productive industry, a good deal might be done to alleviate 
the misery for which the agitators profess to blame the British 
Government. 
Calcutta, India. 



xxn 

HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 

IN THE rural villages, of course, the majority of the inhabi- 
tants are farmers, who fare afield each morning with their 
so-called plows or other tools for aiding the growth of 
their crops. The Indian plow is, I believe, the crudest 
I have found in any part of the wide world. It consists of a 
simple handle with a knob at the top; a block of wood with 
an iron spike in it about an inch thick at one end and tapering 
to a point at the other; and a tongue to which the yoke of bul- 
locks are attached. The pointed spike is, perhaps, sixteen 
inches long, but only a fraction of it projects from the wooden 
block into which it is fastened, and the ordinary plowing con- 
sists only of scratching the two or three inches of the soil's 
upper crust. 

The AUabahad Exposition was designed mainly to interest 
the farmers in better implements, and its Official Handbook, 
in calling attention to the exhibit of improved plows, declared : 

"The ordinary Indian plow is, for certain purposes, about as inefficient as it 
could be. Strictly speaking it is not a plow at all. It makes a tolerably efficient 
seed-drill, a somewhat inefficient cultivator, but it is quite incapable of break- 
ing up land properly." 

The other tools in use on the Indian farm are fit companions 
for the primitive plow. Some one has said that 75 cents would 
buy the complete cultivating outfit of the Hindu ryot! I 
saw men cutting up bullock-feed with a sort of hatchet; the 
threshing methods are centuries old; the little sugarcane mills 

218 



HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 



219 



I found in operation here and there could have been put into 
bushel baskets. The big ox carts, which together with camel 
carts meet all the requirements of travel and transportation, 
are also heavy and clumsy, having wheels as big as we should 
use on eight-horse log-wagons at home. These wheels are 
without metal tires of any kind, and the average cost of one of 
the carts, a village carpenter told me, is $25. 

As to the other crops grown by the Indian ryot, or farmer, I 
cannot perhaps give a better idea than by quoting the latest 
statistics as to the number of acres planted to each as I ob- 
tained them from the government authorities in Calcutta. 



Rice. . . 

Wheat . . 
Barley . . 
Millets , . 
Maize . 
Other grains 
Fodder crops 



73,000,000 Oilseeds : linseed, mustard, 



21,000,000 
8,000,000 

41,000,000 
7,000,000 

47,000,000 
5,000,000 



sesamum, etc. 
Sugarcane 
Cotton 

Jute .... 
Opium (for China) 
Tobacco . 
Orchard and garden 



14,000,000 
2,250,000 

13,000,000 

3,000,000 

416,000 

1,000,000 

5,000,000 



It is somewhat surprising to learn that of the 246,000,000 
acres under cultivation to supply 300,000,000 people (the 
United States last year cultivated 250,000,000 acres to supply 
90,000,000) only 28,000,000 acres were cropped more than once 
during the year. With the warm climate of India it would 
seem that two or more crops might be easily grown, but the 
annual dry season makes this less feasible than it would appear 
to the traveller. Even in January much artificial crop-watering 
must be done, and no one can travel in India long without 
growing used to the sight of the irrigation wells. Around them 
the earth is piled high, and oxen hitched to the well ropes 
draw up the water in collapsible leather bags or buckets. 
A general system of elevated ditches then distributes the water 
where it is needed. 

Concerning the drought, a resident of Muttra said to me that 



220 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

there practically no rain falls from the middle of January to 
the middle of June. "In the latter part of the drought," he 
said, "the fields assume the appearance of deserts; only the 
duU green of the tree-leaves varies the vast, monotonous gray- 
brown of the far-stretching plains. The streams are dried up; 
the cattle hunt the parched fields in vain for a bit of succulence 
to vary their diet of dry grass. But at last there comes the 
monsoon and the rains — and then the Resurrection Morning, 
The dead earth wakens to joyous fruitfulness, and what was but 
yesterday a desert has become a veritable Garden of Eden." 

But, alas ! sometimes the rains are delayed — long, tragically 
long delayed! The time for their annual return has come — • 
has passed, and still the pitiless sun scorches the brown earth 
as if it would set afire the grass it has already burned to tinder- 
dryness. The ryot's scanty stock of grain is running low, 
the daily ration has been reduced until it no longer satisfies 
the pangs of hunger, and with each new sunrise gaunt Famine 
stalks nearer to the occupants of the mud-dried hut. The 
poor peasant lifts vain hands to gods who answer not; unavail- 
ingly he sacrifices to Shiva, to Kali, to all the heartless Hindu 
deities of destruction and to unnamed demons as well. The 
Ancient Terror of India approaches; from time immemorial 
the vengeful drought has slain her people in herds, like plague- 
stricken cattle, not by hundreds and thousands, but by tens 
of thousands and hundreds of thousands. In Calcutta I saw 
several young men whom the mission school rescued from 
starvation in the last great famine of 1901—02 and heard moving 
stories of that terrible time. Many readers will recall the aid 
that America then sent to the suffering, but in spite of the com- 
bined efforts of the British Government and philanthropic 
Christendom, 1,236,855 people lost their lives. To get a better 
grasp upon the significance of these figures it may be mentioned 
that if every man, woman, and child in eight American states 
and territories at that time (Delaware, Utah, Idaho, New 
Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada) had been 



HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 231 

swallowed up in a night, the total loss of life would not have 
been so great as In this one Indian famiue. 

AppaUing as these facts are, it must nevertheless be remem- 
bered that the loss would have been vastly greater but for the 
excellent system of famine relief which the British Government 
has now worked out. It has built railways all over India, so 
that no longer will it be possible for any great area to suffer 
while another district having abundance is unable to share 
its bounty because of absence of transportation. In the second 
place, the government has wisely arranged to give work at 
low wages to famine sufferers — road building, railroad build- 
ing, or something of the kind — instead of dispensing a reckless 
charity which too often pauperizes those it is intended to help. 
Before the British occupation India was scourged both by 
famine and by frequent, if not almost constant, wars between 
neighboring states. The fighting it has stopped entirely, the 
loss by drought it has greatly reduced; and some authority 
has stated (I regret that I have not been able to get the exact 
figures myseK) that for a century before the British assumed 
control, war and famine kept the population practically station- 
ary, while since then the number of inhabitants has practically 
trebled. 

Not unworthy of mention, even in connection with its work 
in relieving famine sufferers, is the excellent work the British 
Government is doing in enabling the farmers to free themselves 
from debt. The visitor to India comes to a keener apprecia- 
tion of Rudyard Kipling's stories and poems of Indian life 
because of the accuracy with which they picture conditions; 
and the second "Maxim of Hafiz" is only one of many that 
have gained new meaning for me since my coming: 

"Yea, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannmn, 
If he borrowed in life from a native at 60 per cent, per annmn." 

When I first heard of "60 per cent, per annum," and even of 
70 per cent, or SO per cent., as the ordinary rate of interest paid 



•im WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

by the Indian ryot to the merchant or money-lender, I could 
not believe it, but further investigation proved the statement 
true. In the United Provinces I found that in some cases 
the ryot has been little better than a serf. The merchant 
has "furnished him supplies, " adding interest at the rate of one 
anna on each rupee at the end of each month — 6| per cent., 
not a year but a month, and that compounded every 30 days ! 
In one case that came to my attention, two orphan boys twenty 
years ago, in arranging the marriage of their sister, borrowed 
100 rupees at 50 per cent, interest. For seventeen years there- 
after they paid 50 rupees each year as interest, until an Ameri- 
can missionary took up the account at 5 per cent, instead of 
50, and in two years they had paid it off with only 7 rupees 
more than they had formerly paid as annual tribute to the 
money-lender. In many such cases debts have been handed 
down from generation to generation, for the Hindu code of 
honor will not permit a son to repudiate the debts of his father; 
and son, grandson, and great-grandson have , staggered under 
burdens they were unable to get rid of. 

In this situation the cooperative credit societies organized 
under government supervision have proved a godsend to the 
people, and thousands of ryots through their aid are now getting 
free of debt for the first time in their lives, and their families 
for perhaps the first time in generations. Each member of a 
cooperative credit society has some interest in it; the govern- 
ment will lend at 4 per cent, an amount not greater than the 
total amount deposited by all the members; stringent regula- 
tions as to loans and their security, deposit of surplus funds, 
accounting, etc., are in force, and altogether the plan is working 
remarkably well. The latest report I have shows that in a 
single twelvemonth the total working capital of these societies 
increased more than 300 per cent. 

The United States seems to be about the only fairly civilized 
country in which some form of cooperative credit society, 
with government aid, has not been worked out. 



HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 223 

Of great help to the small farmer also has been the action 
of the government in regulating land-rents in crowded dis- 
tricts. The courts see to it that no landlord raises rents un- 
fairly. One Brahmin freeholder I met in a small village 
(he owned 250 acres, worth from $130 to $275 per acre) told 
me his rents were 32 to 40 rupees (or from $10 to $13) per acre. 
He grows wheat and cotton, and appeared to be quite intelli- 
gent as well as prosperous, although he wore nothing save a 
turban and an abbreviated lower garment not quite stretching 
from his loins to his knees, the rest of his body being entirely 
naked. 

That the day laborer in India can have but small hope of 
buying land at $100 to $300 an acre (and I think these prices 
general) is indicated by the fact that when I asked, in the next 
village, the wage per month, I was told, "Four or five rupees 
($1.28 to $1.60), the laborer boarding himself." 

"And how much is paid per day when a single day's labor 
is wanted?" I asked. 

"Two annas and bread," was the reply. (An anna is 2 
cents.) 

My informant was the schoolmaster of Khera Kalan village. 
At his school he told me that the children of farmers were allowed 
tuition free; the children of the village people pay 1 to 3 annas 
a month. But so hard is the struggle to get enough coarse 
grain to keep soul and body together (the peasant can seldom 
afford to eat rice or wheat) that few farm children are free 
from work long enough to learn to read and write. 

It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of 
bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless 
surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little 
group whom I found squatted around a missionary's knees in 
a little mud-walled yard just before I left Khera Kalan that 
afternoon. Outside a score of camels were cropping the leaves 
from the banyan trees (the only regular communication with 
the outside world is by camel cart) and the men of the village 



224 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

were grinding sugarcane on the edge of the far-reaching fields 
of green wheat and yellow-blossomed mustard. Not far away 
was a Hindu temple; not far away, too, the historic Grand 
Trunk Road which leads through Khyber Pass into the strange 
land of Afghanistan. It is the road, by the way, over which 
Alexander the Great marched his victorious legions into India, 
and over which centuries later Tamerlane came on his terror- 
spreading invasion. But this has nothing to do with the little 
half-naked boys and girls we are now concerned with. They 
had gathered around the Padre to recite the Ten Command- 
ments and the Lord's Prayer in Hindustani. I asked how 
many had been to school (only one responded), asked something 
about their games, told them something about America, and 
then their instructor inquired (interpreting all the time for me, 
of course) : 

"And what message would you like for the Sahib to give the 
boys and girls of America for you.?" 

"Tell them. Salaam," was the quick chorus in reply. 

"And that is good enough, I guess," remarked the American 
who is now giving his life to the Indian people, "for Salaam 
means, Peace be to you." 

So indeed I pass on the message to the fortunate boys and 
girls of the United States who read this article. " Salaam," 
— Peace be to you, Little Ones. You will never even know 
how favored of Heaven you are in having been born in a land 
where famine never threatens death to you and your kindred, 
where the poor have homes that would seem almost palatial to 
the average Indian child; where educational opportunities are 
within the reach of all; where the religion of the people is an 
aid to moral living and high ideals instead of being a hindrance 
to them; where no caste system decrees that the poorest children 
shall not rise above the condition of their parents; where a wage- 
scale higher far than six cents a day enables the poorest to 
have comforts and cherish ambitions; and where the humblest 
"boy bom in a log cabin" may dream of the Presidency instead 



fflNDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE 225 

of being an outcast whose very touch the upper orders would 
account more polluting than the touch of a beast. 

Ah, the little fate-cursed Indian brats, some of them wearing 
rings in their noses and not much else, who send the message 
through me to you — think of them to-night and be glad that 
to you the lines have fallen in pleasanter places. 

Salaam, indeed, O happy little folk of my own home- 
land across the seas! Peace be to you! 

Jeypore, India. 




XXIII 

THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 

F HINDUISM as a religious or ecclesiastical institu- 
tion we had something to say in another chapter; 
of Hinduism as Social Fact bare mention was made. 
And yet it is in its social aspects, in its enslavement 
of all the women and the majority of the men who come within 
its reach, that Hinduism presents its most terrible phases. 
For Hinduism is Caste and Caste is Hinduism. Upon the in- 
nate. Heaven-ordained superiority of the Brahmin and the 
other twice-born castes, and upon the consequent inferiority of 
the lower castes, the whole system of Brahminism rests. 

Originally there were but four castes : The Brahmin or priest 
caste who were supposed to have sprung from the head of Brah- 
ma or God; the Kshatriya or warrior caste who sprang from his 
arms, the Vasiya or merchant and farmer class who sprang 
from his thigh, and the Sudra or servant and handicraftsmen 
class who came from his feet. The idea of superiority by birth 
having once been accepted as fundamental, however, these 
primary castes were themselves divided and subdivided along 
real or imaginary lines of superiority or inferiority until to-day 
the official government statistics show 2378 castes in India. 
You cannot marry into any one of the other 2377 classes of Hin- 
dus; you cannot eat with any of them, nor can you touch any 
of them. 

Thus Caste is the Curse of India. It is the very antithesis 
of democracy — blighting, benumbing, paralyzing to all aspi- 
ration and all effort at change or improvement. 

S26 



THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 227 

No man may rise to a higher caste than that into which he is 
bom; but he may fall to a lower one. 

There is no opportunity for progress; the only way to move 
is backward. Don't kick against the pricks therefore. You 
were bom a Brahmin with wealth and power because you won 
the favor of the gods in some previous existence; or you were 
born a Sudra, predestined to a life of suffering and semi-star- 
vation, because in your previous existence you failed to merit 
better treatment from the gods. If you are only a sweeper, 
be glad that you were not born a pig or a cobra. Kismet, 
Fate, has fixed at birth your changeless station in this life; 
and, more than this, it has written on your brow the things 
which must happen to you throughout your whole existence. 

The Brahmin put himself into a position of superiority 
and then said to all the other classes : Rebel not at the inequal- 
ities of life. They are ordained of the gods. The good that 
the higher castes enjoy is the reward of their having conducted 
themselves properly in previous existences. Submit yourself 
to your lot in the hope that with obedience to what the Brah- 
mins tell you, you may possibly likewise win birth into a higher 
caste next time. But strike a Brahmin even so much as with 
a blade of grass and your soul shall be reborn into twenty and 
one lives of impure animals before it assumes human shape 
again. 

Never in human history has the ingenuity of a ruling class 
devised a cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its suprem- 
acy. Never has there been a religion more depressing, more 
hopeless, more deadening to all initiative. "Jo hxyta so hota,^' 
— " What is happening was to happen " — so said the wounded 
men who had gone to the Bombay hospital to have their limbs 
amputated a few days before I got there. "It is written on 
my forehead," a man will often say with stoical indifference 
when some calamity overtakes him, in allusion to the belief 
that on the sixth night after birth Vidhata writes on every 
man's forehead the main events of his life-to-be, and no act 



238 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

of his can change them. "I was impelled of the gods to do 
the deed," a criminal will say in the courts. *'And I am im- 
pelled of the gods to punish you for it," the judge will some- 
times answer. If plague comes, the natives can only be brought 
by force to observe precautions against it. "If we are to die, 
we shall die; why offend the gods by attempting interference 
with their plans?" The fatalism of the East as expressed by 
Omar Khayyam is the daily creed of India's millions: 

"We are no other than a Moving Row 
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go. . . . 

"But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays 
Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days." 

It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted; 
but for this belief that all things are predestined, no people 
would ever have been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny 
of the caste system. Perhaps it should also be added that the 
belief in the transmigration of the soul has also had a not in- 
considerable influence. Though you have fared ill in this 
life, a million rebirths may be yours ere you finally win absorp- 
tion into Brahma, and in these million future lives the gods may 
deal more prodigally with you. Indeed, the things you most 
desire may be yours in your rebirth. "You are interested 
in India; therefore you may have your next life as an Indian," 
an eminent Hindu said to me. But Heaven forbid ! 

At any rate, with this double layer of nourishing earth — 
the belief, first, that what you are now is the result of your 
actions in previous lives, and, secondly, that there are plenty 
more rebirths in which any merit you possess may have its 
just recompense of reward, the caste system has flourished 
like the Psalmist's green bay tree, though its influence has 
been more like that of the deadly upas. 

If you are a high-caste man you may not only refuse to eat 
with or touch a low-caste man, your equal perhaps in intel- 



THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 229 

ligence and in morals, but in some cases you may even demand 
that the low-caste man shall not pollute you by coming too 
near you on the road. On page 540 of the 1901 "Census of 
India Report" will be found a table showing at what distances 
the presence of certain inferior classes become contaminating 
to a Brahmin! Moreover, the low-caste man, offensive to 
men, is taught that he is equally offensive to the gods. He 
must not worship in the temples; must not even approach them. 
Usually it is taken for granted that no Pariah will take such a 
liberty, but in some places I have seen signs in English posted 
on the temple gates warning tourists who have low-caste ser- 
vants that these servants cannot enter the sacred buildings. 

Not only are these creatures of inferior orders vile in them- 
selves, but the work which they do has also come to be regarded 
as degrading. A high-caste man will not be caught doing any 
work which is "beneath him." The cook will not sweep; 
the messenger boy would not pick up a book from the floor. 
The liveried Brahmin who takes your card at the American 
Consulate in Calcutta once lost his place rather than pick up a 
slipper; rather than humiliate himself in such fashion he would 
walk half a mile to get some other servant for the duty. It is 
no uncommon thing to find that your servant will carry a pack- 
age for you, but will hire another servant if a small package 
of his own is to be moved. "I had a boy for thirteen years, 
the best boy I ever had, till he died of the plague," a Bombay 
Englishman said to me, "and he shaved me regularly all the 
time. But when I gave him a razor with which to shave him- 
self, I found it did no good. He would have 'lost caste' if he 
had done barber's work for anybody but a European!" 

"I have a good sweeper servant," a Calcutta minister told 
me, "but if I should attempt to promote him beyond his caste 
and make a house-servant of him, every other servant I have 
would leave, including my cook, who has been a Christian 
twenty years!" 

The absurdities into which the caste system runs are well 



mo WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAXING UP 

illustrated by some facts which came to my notice on a visit 
to a school for the Dom caste conducted by some English people 
in Benares. The Doms burn the bodies of the dead at the 
Ganges ghats, and do other "dirty work." Incidentally they 
form the "thief caste" in Benares, and whenever a robbery 
occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom is guilty. 
For this reason a great number of Doms (they belong to the 
Gypsy class and have no houses anywhere) make it a practice 
to sleep on the ground just outside the police station nearly 
all the year round, reporting to the authorities so as to be able 
to prove an alibi in case of a robbery. So low are the Doms 
that to touch anything belonging to one works defilement; 
consequently they leave their most valuable possessions un- 
guarded about their tents or shacks, knowing full well that 
not even a thief of a higher caste will touch them. 

"We had a servant," a Benares lady said to me, "who lost 
his place rather than take up one end of a forty-foot carpet 
while a Dom had hold of the other end. The new bearer, his 
successor, did risk helping move a box with a Dom handling the 
other side of it, but he was outcasted for the action, and it cost 
him 25 rupees to be reinstated. And until reinstated, of course, 
he could not visit kinsmen or friends nor could friends or kins- 
men have visited him even to help at a funeral; his priest, his 
barber, and his washerman would have shunned him. Again, 
our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of the Brali- 
mins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chip- 
rassi or messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the 
letter on the floor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes 
the pollution that would come from actual contact with the 
chiprassi." Moreover, there are social gradations even among 
the Doms. One Dom proudly confided to this lady that he 
was a sort of superior being because the business of his family 
was to collect the bones of dead animals, a more respectable 
work than that in which some other Doms engaged ! 

Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta 



THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 231 

tells how one day when a dead eat had to be moved from her 
yard her sweeper proudly pulled himself up and assured her 
that, though the lowest among all servants, he was still too 
high to touch the body of a dead animal! 

My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes 
this a suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences 
of a well-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places 
in India. The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last 
been exterminated, but the English Government has not yet 
been able to end the activities of those who regard the plunder 
of the public as their immemorial right. In Delhi a friend of 
mine told me that the watchmen are known to be of the robber 
class. "You hire one of them to watch your house at night, 
and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that 
mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left 
his shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection 
enough, as the robbers would see that I had paid the proper 
blackmail by hiring one of their number as chowkidar." 

In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element 
carrying things with a much higher hand. "There's where 
they live," Dr. J. P. Jones, the well-known writer on Indian 
affairs, said to me as we were coming home one nightfall, 
"and the people of Madura pay them a tribute amounting 
to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of their own 
whom they always consult before making a raid. If he signi- 
fies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise, not — 
though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with 
the verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the 
great majority of cases." 

India's most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping 
down roots from a score or a hundred limbs; these roots 
fasten themselves in the earth and later become parent trees 
for other multiplying limbs and roots, until the whole earth is 
covered. In much the same fashion the Indian caste system has 



232 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

developed. Instead of the four original castes there are now 
more than five hundred times that number, and the system 
now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what social 
station the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to 
the grave (or from the time the conch shell announces 
the birth of a man-child till the funeral pyre consumes his 
body, to use Indian terminology), but also decrees almost as 
irrevocably what business he may or may not follow. A little 
American girl of my acquaintance once announced that she 
hadn't decided whether she would be a trained nurse, a chorus- 
girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any such 
embarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or 
a thief is largely decided for him before he knows his own name. 
"But isn't the system weakening now?" the reader asks, 
as I have also asked in almost every quarter of. India. The 
general testimony seems to be that it is weakening, and yet in 
no very rapid manner. Eventually, no doubt, it will die, but 
it will die hard. A few weeks ago, a Parliament of Relig- 
ions was held in connection with the AUabahad Exposition, 
with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as the presid- 
ing officer. In the course of his "Presidential Address" the 
Maharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system, 
resorting in part to so specious an argument as the following: 

" K education means the drawing forth of the potentialities of a boy and fit- 
ting him for taking his ordained place as a member of society, then the caste 
system has hitherto done this work in a way which no other plan yet contrived 
has ever done. The mere teaching of a youth a smattering of the three R's 
and nothing else in a primary school is little else than a mere mockery. Un- 
der the caste system the boys are initiated and educated almost from infancy 
into the family industry, trade, profession, or handicraft, and become adepts in 
their various lines of life almost before they know it. This unique system of 
education is one of the blessings of our caste arrangement. We know that a 
horse commands a high price in the market if it has a long pedigree behind it. 
It is not unreasonable to presume that a carpenter whose forefathers have fol- 
lowed the same trade for centmies will be a better carpenter than one who is 
new to the trade — all other advantages being equal." 



THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 233 

In the phrase, "his ordained place as a member of society," 
we have the keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole 
caste system rests. It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to 
have the people believe that his sons were "ordained" of 
Heaven to be rulers, even if "not fit to stop a gully with," 
and the Sudra's sons "ordained" to be servants, no matter what 
their qualities of mind and sovd. But the caste system is 
rotting down in other places and sometime or other this "or- 
dained" theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric 
will totter to the ruin it has long and richly merited. 

The introduction of railways has proved one of the great 
enemies of caste. Men of different rank who formerly would 
not have rubbed elbows under any considerations sit side by 
side in the railway cars — and they prefer to do it rather than 
travel a week by bullock-cart to reach a place which is but 
a few hours by tram. Consequently the priests have had to 
wink at "breaking caste" in this way, just as they had to get 
around the use of waterworks in Calcutta. According to the 
strict letter of the law a Hindu may not drink water which 
has been handled by a man of lower caste (in Muttra I have 
seen Brahmins hired to give water to passersby), but the 
priests decided that the payment of water-rates might be 
regarded as atonement for the possible defilement, and con- 
sequently Hindus now have the advantages of the city water 
supply. 

Foreign travel has also jarred the caste system rather se- 
verely. The Hindu statutes strictly forbid a man from leaving 
the boundaries of India, but the folk have progressed from 
technical evasion of the law to open violation of its provisions. 
In Jeypore I saw the half -acre of trunks and chests which the 
Maharaja of that province used for transporting his goods and 
chattels when he went to attend the coronation of the King 
of England. The Maharaja is a Hindu of the Hindus, claims 
descent from one of the high and mighty gods, and when he 
was named to go to London, straightway declared that the 



234 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

caste law against leaving India stood hopelessly in the way. 
Finally, however, he was convinced that by taking all his 
household with him, his servants, his priests, material for set- 
ting up a Hindu temple, a six-months' supply of Ganges water, 
etc., he might take enough of India with him to make the trip 
in safety, and he went. Now many are going without any 
such precautions, and a moderate fee paid to the priests usually 
enables them to resume caste relations upon their return. 

Sometimes, however, the penalties are heavier. A Hindu 
merchant of Amritsar, who grew very friendly with a Delhi 
friend of mine on a voyage from Europe, said just before 
reaching Bombay : " Well, I shall have to pay for all this when I 
get home, and I shall be lucky if I get off without making a 
pilgrimage to all the twelve sacred places of our religion. 
And in any case I shall never let my wife know that I have 
broken caste by eating with foreigners." My impression is, 
however, that only in a very few cases now is the crime of 
foreign travel punished so severely. In Madras I met one of 
the most eminent Hindu leaders, Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer. 
"Caste has kept me from going abroad until now," he told me, 
"but I have made up my mind to let it interfere no longer. 
Just as soon as business permits, I shall go to Europe and 
possibly to America." 

Christianity is another mightily effective foe of Caste. As 
in the olden days, it exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. 
In Muttra I found a converted high-caste Brahmin acting as 
sexton of a Christian church whose members are sweepers 
— outcast folk whom as a Hindu he would have scorned to 
touch. On the other hand, the acceptance of Christianity 
frees a man from the restrictions imposed upon a low caste, 
even though it does not give him the privileges of a higher 
caste and thus often wins for the Christianized Hindu higher 
regard from all classes. Thus there was in Moradabadad 
some years ago the son of a poor sweeper who became a Chris- 
tian, and was a youth of such fine promise that a way was 



THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA 235 

found for him to attend Oxford University. Returning, h® 
became a teacher in Moradabadad Mission School and won 
such golden opinions from his townspeople that when he died 
the whole city — Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians alike 
— stopped for his funeral. 

In its present elaborate form the caste system is undoubtedly 
doomed. It is too purely artificial to endure after the people 
acquire even a modicum of education. Perhaps it was 
planned originally as a means of preserving the racial integrity 
and political superiority of the Aryan invaders, but for un- 
numbered centuries it has been simply a gigantic engine of 
oppression and social injustice. At the present time no blood 
or social difference separates the great majority of castes from 
the others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and 
so high an authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that 
even in the beginning all the castes save the Sudras were of 
the same race and blood. 

If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent the 
intermarriage of radically different races, this may be accom- 
plished, as it is accomplished in our own Southern States, 
without restricting the right of the individual to engage in any 
line of work for which he is fitted or to go as high in that work 
as his ability warrants. Booker Washington, born in the 
South's lowest ranks, becomes a world-figure; had he been born 
in India's lowest caste, he would have remained a burner of 
dead bodies. To compare the South's effort to preserve race 
integrity with India's Juggernaut of caste is absurd. 

Bombay, India. 



XXIV 

THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 

IN INDIA marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert 
Compton remarks. There are no bachelors or old maids. 
Children in their cradles are not infrequently given in 
marriage by their parents; they are sometimes promised 
in marriage (contingent upon sex) before they are born. 

"You are married, of course?" the zenana women will ask 
when an American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the 
answer is in the negative, "Why not.^ Couldn't they get 
anybody to have you?" 

"Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow," 
is an Indian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot 
of woman is hard if she be a wife; it is immeasurably harder 
if she be a widow. Hinduism enslaves a majority of the men 
within its reach; of the women within its reach it enslaves all. 

I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of 
a civilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept 
this standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near 
the bottom. In the great temple at Madura are statues of 
"The Jealous Husband" who always carried his wife with 
him on his shoulder wherever he went; and the attitude of the 
man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as a system. 
It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that woman 
is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "Dhar- 
ma Sastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: 
"It is the nature of woman in this world to cause men to sin. 
A female is able to draw from the right path, not a fool 

236 



THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 237 

only, but even a sage." And the "Code of Hindu Laws," 
drawn up by order of the Indian Government for the guidance 
of judges, declares: 

"A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in subjection 
that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her 
own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will 
behave amiss, A woman is not to be relied on." 

" Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without 
doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar." 

In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman 
has been divided into "the three subjections." In childhood 
she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband; 
in widowhood to her sons or — most miserable of all ! — lack- 
ing a son, to her husband's kinsmen. Her husband is supposed 
to stand to her almost in the relation of a god. "No sacrifice 
is allowed to women apart from their husbands," says Manu, 
"no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife honors 
her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven," And a recent 
Hindu writer says, "To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas 
(the Hindu scriptures). To worship the husband is to wor- 
ship the gods." 

Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are 
doubly hard on the women. The women may no more rise above 
their caste than the male members of the family; and they are 
predestined to take up life's most serious duties before their 
fleeting childhood has spent itself. No wonder they look old 
before they are thirty ! 

If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, 
a trip through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. 
A law enacted by the British Government a few years ago 
decrees that while the marriage ceremonies may be performed 
at any age, the girl shall not go to her husband as his wife until 
she is twelve years old; but it is doubtful if even this mild 
measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I attended an elaborate 



288 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was told that the bride 
was "eleven or twelve" and would go to her husband's 
home (he lives with his father, of course) the following week. 
My travelling servant told me that he was married when he 
was sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years 
longer with her parents before coming to him. The first 
American lady I met in India was telling of a wedding she 
had recently attended, the bride being a girl of eleven and the 
groom a year or two older. In Secunderabad a friend of mine 
found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who had been given in 
marriage, and in the house where he visited was a ten-year-old 
girl who had been married two years before to a man of thirty. 

In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls 
Manu named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maxi- 
mum. The father who delays finding a husband for his daugh- 
ter until after she is twelve is regarded as having committed 
a crime — though it must always be remembered that girls 
and boys in India mature a year or two younger than boys 
and girls in the United States. 

One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost 
increases with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies 
in all cases are expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish 
about as much excitement as circuses at home. My first 
introduction to a Hindu wedding was in Agra one Sunday 
afternoon — though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is the same 
as any other day — and the shops were in full blast (if such a 
strenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless 
Hindu merchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy 
as they ever are. From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, 
and as the deafening hullabaloo came nearer its volume and 
violence increased until it would have sufficed to bring down 
the walls of Jericho in half the time Joshua took for the job. 
Just behind the drummers came two gorgeously clad small 
boys astride an ass begarlanded with flowers; and when the 
musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so as 



THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 239 

to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the 
meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight- 
year-old small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and 
gauze and who ought to have been at home studying the Sec- 
ond Reader, was on his way to be married, and the little chap 
riding behind him was the brother of the bride. It was very 
hard to realize that such tots were not merely "playing 
wedding" instead of being principal participants in a serious 
ceremony ! 

The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged 
for a couple who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, 
and though no one could have asked for a more gracious wel- 
come than my American friend and I received, I very much 
doubt if any one of the high-caste folk about us would have 
condescended to eat at the same table with us even to end a 
three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Earn by name, was a 
nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently 
pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already 
been a three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's 
house, we were told, and this was the fifth and last day of the 
ceremonies and feasts arranged by the groom's father. One 
thousand people had been invited and, judging from the rich- 
ness of the food with which we were served, I should think 
that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5G00 rupees, or 
$1633, was none too high. 

Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor 
father, or a father with several daughters to find husbands for, 
must often strain his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. 
It is said that among the humbler classes a father will some- 
times mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this 
purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who 
has gone to the groom's father with the story that the bride is 
"as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant, 
and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's " — he must also be paid 
for his indispensable services. 



240 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her 
childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man — 
whose face she may never have seen but once or twice — to 
take up the hard life of a Hindu wife in the home of her 
father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet from her infancy she 
has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion of the infe- 
riority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so galling 
as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at 
the same table with her husband, but must be content with 
what he leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in 
bringing the people to a higher appreciation of the dignity of 
womanhood. "Some of my girls are engaged to be married,'* 
Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home in Calcutta, said to me, 
"and when their fiances come to call, after the Christian 
fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors while the 
boys are seated." 

Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: 
either that her husband may die or that he may supplant her 
by a second wife. If she Uves seven years as a wife without 
giving birth to a son, the husband is authorized by law and 
religion to take a second spouse; and in nearly all such cases 
the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W. J. Wilkins says 
that a servant in his employ married a second wife and in- 
sisted that the first should not only support herself but con- 
tribute the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. 
The older wife is tantalized by the thought that she herself 
was selected by the parents of her husband, while the new wife 
is probably his own choice; and another cause of jealousy is 
found in the new wife's youth. For no matter how old the man 
himself may be — forty, fifty or sixty — his bride is always a 
girl of twelve or thereabouts — and for the very simple reason 
that practically no girls remain single longer, and widows are 
never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay 
of a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an 
agent to his native village and caste with power to negotiate. 




THE TAJ MAHAL FROM THE ENTRANCE GATE 

The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful than the 

building itself 



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GUNGA DIN ON DRESS PARADE 
Ordinarily the Indian water carrier, or bkisti, is attired more nearly after 
the manner described in Kipling's poem: 
"The uniform 'e wore 
Was nothing much before 
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind. 
For a twisty piece o' rag and a goatskin leather bag 
Was all the 6eld equipment 'e could find." 



THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 243 

"My friends have persuaded me that I ought not to marry 
a very young girl," he said to the agent, "get an older one there- 
fore ^ — oh, it doesn't matter if she is twenty-four." 

The agent left and two days thereafter the Hindu received 
this message: "Can't find one of twenty-four. How about 
two of twelve each?" 

The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing 
to the troubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brah- 
minism is that she is responsible through some evil committed 
either in this existence or a previous one, for the death of her 
husband, and the crudest indignities of the Hindu social system 
are reserved for the bereaved and unfortunate woman. If a 
man or boy die, no matter if his wife is yet a prattling girl in 
her mother's home, she can never remarry, but is doomed to 
live forever as a despised slave in the home of his father and 
mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved; 
and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humilia- 
tion the gods are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her. 
In a school I visited in Calcutta I was told that there were two 
little widows, one five years old and one six. 

Formerly and up to the time that the British Government 
stopped the practice less than a century ago, it was regarded 
as the widow's duty to burn herself alive on her husband's 
funeral pyre. "It is proper for a woman after her husband's 
death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws, "to burn herself in 
the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus burns herself 
shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000 years 
by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve 
an inviolable chastity." This rite of self-immolation was 
known as suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century 
ago the suttees numbered one hundred a month. It was an 
old custom to set up a stone with carved figures of a man and a 
woman to mark the spot where a widow had performed suttee, 
and travellers to-day still find these gruesome and barbaric 
memorials here and there along the Indian roadsides. More- 



244 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

over, the present general treatment of widows in India is so 
heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare 
that they would prefer the suttee. 

And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; 
that a kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows 
which blacken the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often 
better than their customs and sometimes better than their 
religions. The high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan women 
who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in the case 
of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows of 
their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict 
letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, 
doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affec- 
tion for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the 
world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a 
high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father 
on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and 
talking with his daughter who was just budding into maiden- 
hood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to 
me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it." 

Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as 
hopeless while the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the 
most beautiful monument ever erected in memory of a woman's 
love. True, Shah Jehan, the monarch who built it, was not a 
Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet Mohammedanism, 
although its customs are less brutal, places woman in almost 
the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status 
of woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great 
religions of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an 
end by referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. 
Of all that I saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of 
the Himalayas from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the 
view of the Taj Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon. 

The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, 
"Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of God," 



THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN 245 

is enough to assure one that Arimand Banu, "The Exalted 
One of the Palace," whose dust it was built to shelter, was 
a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and fea- 
ture. We know but little about her. There are pictures 
which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; 
there are records to show that it was in 1615 that she became 
the bride of the prince who later began to rule as "His Imperial 
Highness, the second Alexander (Lord of the two Horns) 
King Shah Jehan," and we may see in Agra the rooms m the 
palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian Nights-like 
splendor characteristic of Oriental courts 

"Mumtaz-i-Mahal," they called her — "Pride of the Palace." 
And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of 
motherhood — that way along which woman finds the testing 
of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her exist- 
ence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that for- 
ever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seven times 
she walked the mother's ancient way down to the gates of 
Death and brought back a new life with her, but the eighth 
time she did not return. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carry- 
ing in his heart a sorrow which not all his pomp nor power 
could heal, declared that she should have the most beautiful 
tomb that the mind of man could plan. So the Taj was built 
— "in memory of a deathless love," and in a garden which is 
always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue 
of fountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four 
graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, "like four tall court- 
ladies tending their princess," there stands this dream in 
marble, "the most exquisite building on earth." 

With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail 
in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that 
the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in 
a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the 
womanhood of the country in which it is so incongruously placed. 

Madras, India. 



XXV 

MORE LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 

THERE are many show places and "points of inter- 
est" in India that have a hundred times more 
attention in the guide books, but there is a simple 
tomb in Lucknow — it cost no more than many 
a plain farmer's tombstone in our country burying-places — 
which impressed me more than anything else I saw excepting 
only the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal and the view of Benares 
from the river. 

It is the tomb of the heroic Sir Henry Lawrence, who died 
so glorious a death in the great mutiny of 1857. No com- 
mander in all India has planned more wisely for the defence df 
the men and women under his care; and yet the siege had only 
begun when he was mortally wounded. He called his suc- 
cessor and his associates to him, and at last, having omitted 
no detail of counsel or information that might enable them to 
carry out his far-seeing plans, he roused himself to dictate 
his own immortal epitaph: 

Here Lies 

HENRY LAWRENCE 

Who Tried to Do His Duty 

May the Lord Have Mercy on his Soul. 

And so to-day these lines, "in their simplicity sublime," 
mark his last resting place; and one feels somehow that not 
even the great Akbar in Secundra or Napoleon in Paris has a 
worthier monument. 

246 



LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 247 

There are many places in India to which I should like to 
give a paragraph. I should like to write much of Delhi and 
its palaces in which the Great Moguls once lived in a splendor 
worthy of the monarchs in the Arabian Nights — no wonder 
the stately Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Public Audience, bears the 
famous inscription in Persian: 

"If there be Paradise on earth. 
It is this, oh, it is this, oh, it is this!" 

In the ruins of seven dead and deserted Delhis round about the 
present city and the monuments and memorials which com- 
memorate "the old far-off unhappy things" of conquered 
dynasties and romantic epochs, there is also material for many 
a volume. 

Then there is Cawnpore with its tragic and sickening mem- 
ories of the English women and children (with the handful 
of men) who were butchered in cold blood by the treacherous 
Nana Dhundu Pant; and I was greatly interested in meeting 
in Muttra one of the few living men, a Christianized Brahmin, 
who as a small boy witnessed that terrible massacre which for 
cruelty and heartlessness is almost without a parallel in mod- 
ern history. 

In Agra is the Pearl Mosque, which is itself an architectural 
triumph splendid enough to make the city famous if the Taj 
had not already made it so; the Great Temple in Madura is 
one of the most impressive of the strictly Hindu structures in 
India; in Madras I found a curious reminder of early missionary 
activity in the shape of a cathedral which is supposed to shelter 
the remains of the Apostle Thomas; and the ruins of the once 
proud and imperial but now utterly deserted cities of Amber 
and Fatehpuhr-Sikri have a strange and melancholy interest. 
But all these have been often enough described, and there are 
things of greater pith and moment in present-day India to 
which we can better give attention. 



348 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

One thing concerning India, which should perhaps have been 
said in the beginning, but which has not had attention until 
now, is the fact that it is no more a homogeneous country than 
Europe is — • has perhaps, indeed, a greater variety of languages, 
peoples, and racial and traditional differences than the Euro- 
pean continent. I have already called attention to the fact 
that there are 2378 castes. There are also 40 distinct national- 
ities or races and 180 languages. For an utterly alien race to 
govern peacefully such a heterogeneous conglomeration of 
peoples, representing all told nearly one fifth of the population 
of the whole earth, is naturally one of the most difficult ad- 
ministrative feats in history, and Mr. Roosevelt probably did 
not give the English too high praise when he declared: "In 
India we encounter the most colossal example history affords 
of the successful administration by men of European blood 
of a thickly populated region in another continent. It is 
the greatest feat of the kind that has been performed since the 
break-up of the Roman Empire. Indeed, it is a greater feat 
than was performed under the Roman Empire." 

I was interested to find that the American-born residents of 
India give, if anything, even higher praise to British rule than 
the British themselves. "I regard the English official in 
India," one distinguished American in southern India went so 
far as to say to me, "as the very highest type of administra- 
tive official in the world. More than this, 90 per cent, of the 
common people would prefer to trust the justice of the British 
to that of the Brahmins." In Delhi an American missionary 
expressed the opinion that the American Government, if in 
control of India, would not be half so lenient with the breeders 
of sedition and anarchy as is the British Government. 

It should be said, however, that there are now fewer of these 
malcontents, and these few are less influential tlian at any 
time for some years past. In Madras I was very glad to get 
an interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer, one of the most 
distinguished of the Hindu leaders. 




BATHING IN THE SACRED GANGES AT BENARES 




THE BATTLE-SCARRED AND WORLD-FAMOUS RESIDENCY AT 
LUCKNOW 

The writer was shown through the historic fortress by William Ireland, one 
of the few living survivors of the great siege. In Muttra the writer also met 
Isa Doss, a Hindu (now a Christian preacher) who saw the massacre of the 
English women and children by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant 



LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 251 

"Lord Morley's reforms," he declared, "have been so exten- 
sive and have satisfied such a large proportion of our people 
that the extremists no longer have any considerable following. 
We no longer feel that it is England's intention to keep us in 
the condition of hopeless helots. The highest organization 
for the government of the country is the British Secretary of 
State and his council; Lord Morley placed two Indians there. 
In India the supreme governmental organization is the Gov- 
ernor-General and his council; he put an Indian there. In 
three large provinces — Bombay, Madras, and Bengal — In- 
dians have been added to the executive councils. 

"For the first time, too, our people are really an influential 
factor in the provincial and imperial legislative councils. We 
have had representation in these councils, it is true, for fifty 
years; but it was not until 1892 that representation be- 
came considerable, and even then the right of the people 
to name members was not recognized. So-called consti- 
tuencies were given authority to make nominations, but 
the government retained the right to reject or confirm these 
at pleasure. 

"Now, however, through Lord Morley's and Lord Minto's 
reforms, the number of Indians on these councils has been 
more than doubled — in the case of the Imperial Council 
actually trebled — and the absolute right given the people to 
elect a large proportion, averaging about 40 per cent, of the 
total number, without reference to the wishes of the govern- 
ment. In fact, with two fifths of all the members chosen by 
the people and a considerable number of other members chosen 
from municipal boards, chambers of commerce, universities, 
etc., we now see the spectacle of Provincial Councils with non- 
official members in the majority. In Bombay the non-official 
element is two thirds of the whole; and in Madras also the non- 
official members could defeat the government if they chose to 
combine and do so. But of course the greater willingness of 
the government to cooperate with the people has brought 



252 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

about a greater willingness on the part of the people to co- 
operate with the government. 

"The appointment of Indians to the highest offices charged 
with the responsibility of government; the increased repre- 
sentation given the people on the legislative and executive 
councils; the recognition of the right of the people to elect 
instead of merely to nominate members; and the surrender 
of majority-control to the non-official element — all these 
are very substantial gains, but the spirit back of them is worth 
more than the reforms themselves. While there is a feeling 
in some quarters that the government has not gone far enough, 
the large majority of my educated countrymen regard the 
advance as sufficient for the present and look forward with 
hope to a further expansion of our powers and privileges." 

If I may judge by what I gathered from conversation with 
Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, I should say that no one 
has given a more accurate and clear-cut statement of the feel- 
ings of the Indian people than has Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer in 
these few terse sentences. 

"The wealth of the Indies" has been a favorite phrase with 
romantic writers from time immemorial; and a book now before 
me speaks in the most matter-of-course way of "the pros- 
perous and peaceful empire." Yet the Indian is really one 
of the poorest men on earth. The wealth with which the Mo- 
guls and kings of former ages dazzled the world was wrung from 
the hard hands of peasants who were governed upon the theory 
that what the king wanted was his, and what he left was theirs. 
Even the splendid palaces and magnificent monuments, such 
as the Taj Mahal, were built largely by forced, unpaid labor. 
In some cases it is said that the monarch did not even deign 
to furnish food for the men whom he called away from the 
support of their families. 

An ignorant people is always a poor people, and we have 
already seen that only 10 per cent, of the men in India can read 
or write, and of these 10 per cent, the majority are Brahmins. 



LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 253 

Then, again, the people use only the crudest tools and ma- 
chinery; and a third factor in keeping them poor is the system 
of early marriage. When it is a common thing for a boy of 
fifteen or sixteen to be the father of a growing family, it is 
easy to see that not much can be laid up for rainy days. 

Owing to the absence of diversified industries, the crude- 
ness of the tools, the ignorance of the men behind the tools, and 
the over-crowded population of folk hard-pressed by poverty, 
the wages are what an American would call shamefully low. 
An Englishman who had lived in an interior jungle-village, 
five days by bullock-cart from a railway, told me that twenty 
years ago laborers were paid 2 rupees (64 cents) a month, 
boarding themselves, or 4 rupees ($1.28) a year and grain. 
The wages have now advanced, however, to 5 rupees ($1.60) 
a month where the man boards himself; and for day labor the 
wages are now five annas (10 cents) instead of two annas 
(4 cents) twenty years ago. 

In Madura a weU-educated Hindu with whom I was talking 
rang the familiar changes on the "increasing cost of living," 
and pointed out that in four or five years the cost of unskilled 
labor has increased from eight to twelve cents. "And in some 
towns," he declared, looking at the same time as if he feared 
I should not believe his story, "they are demanding as much 
as 8 annas (16 cents) a day!" In Bombay I was told that 
coolies average 16 to 20 cents a day; spinners in jute factories, 
$1.16 a week, weavers, $1.82. In a great cotton factory I 
visited in Madras, employing about 4000 natives (all males) 
the average wages for eleven and a half hours' work is $3.84 
to $4,85 a month. In Ahmedabad, another cotton manu- 
facturing centre, about the same scale is in force. Miners 
get 16 to 28 cents a day. Servants, $3.20 to $3.84 a month. 

The women in Calcutta (some of them with their babies 
tied out to stakes while they worked) whom I saw carrying 
brick and mortar on their heads to the tops of three and four 
story buildings, get 3 to 4 annas a day — 6 to 8 cents. In 



254 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Darjeeling the bowed and toil-cursed women laden like donkeys, 
whom I found bringing stone on their backs from quarries 
two or three miles away managed to make 12 to 16 cents a 
day for their bitter toil up steep hills and down, for eight long 
hours. Women who carried lighter loads of mud, making 50 
trips averaging 20 miles of travel, earned only 8 cents, as 
did also the women with babies strapped on their backs, who 
nevertheless toiled as steadily as the others. 

"As for the men I pay these strong, brawny Bhutia fellows 
8 annas (16 cents) a day," the contractor told me, "but those 
Nepalese who are not so strong get only 5 annas for shovelling 
earth." 

Director of Agriculture Couclmian of the Madras Presi- 
dency gave me the following as the usual scale of wages for 
farm work: men 6 to 8 cents; women 4 to 6; children 3 to 5, 
the laborers boai'ding themselves. 

With this Mr. Couchman, whom I have just mentioned, I 
had a very interesting interview in Madras which should shed 
some light on Indian agriculture. 

"In Madras Presidency," he told me, "we cultivate 10,- 
000,000 acres of rice, which is the favorite food of the people. 
As it is expensive compared with some cheaper foods, however, 
the people put 4,500,000 acres to a sort of sorghum — not the 
sorghum cultivated for syrup or sugar but for the seed to be 
used as a grain food — and also grow 4,000,000 acres of millet 
the seed of which are used as a grain food. 

"Then we grow 2,000,000 acres in cotton, but cotton in 
India is grown only on black soils. We want some for red 
soils, and we are also seeking to increase the yield and the 
length of staple in the indigenous varieties. In both these 
points the Indian cotton now compares very badly with the 
American. Our average yield is only about 50 to 100 pounds 
lint per acre, and the staple is only three quarters to five 
eights of an inch in length, and not suitable for spinning over 
20s in warp. 




BURNING THE BODIES OF DEAD HINDUS 




AN INDIAN CAMEL CART 




TRAVEL IN INDIA 
How the author and his friends made the trip from Jeypore to Amber 



LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 267 

"Of course, with our dense population, land is high and our 
system of farming expensive. Good irrigated wet land, used 
chiefly for rice, is worth from $166 to $500 per acre, renting for 
$20 to $25; dry land sells for $17 to $133 per acre and rents 
for from $3 to $5. It is commonly said that a man and his 
family should make a living on two acres, and the usual one- 
man farm consists of 5 to 10 acres of wet land or 30 to 50 of 
dry. The wet land farmers are generally renters, the others 
owners. Of course, you have noticed that no horses are used 
on the farms, nothing but bullocks; nor do I think that horses 
will be used for a long time to come. We are making some 
progress in introducing better methods of farming. Little, 
of course, can be done with bulletins where such a small 
percentage of the people can read, but demonstration farms 
have proved quite successful, and the government is much 
pleased with the results obtained from employing progressive 
native farmers to instruct their neighbors." 

The advancing price of cotton has proved a matter of hardly 
less interest to India than to America, and for several years 
the crop has been steadily increasing. The 1910-11 crop 
(the picking ended in May) was almost 4,500,000 bales of 
400 pounds each. The necessity for growing food crops, 
however, is so imperative that the cotton acreage cannot be 
greatly increased — at least not soon. During our Civil 
War, it will be remembered, India did her uttermost; and Bom- 
bay laid the foundations of her greatness in the high prices 
then paid for the fleecy staple. Hers is still a great cotton 
market and down one of her main streets from morning to 
night one sees an almost continuous line of cotton carts, drawn 
by bullocks and driven by men almost as black as our negroes 
in the South. I was very much interested in seeing how much 
better the lint is baled than in America. In the first place the 
bagging is better — less ragged than that we commonly use — 
and in the next place it is held in place by almost twice as many 
encircling bands or ties as our bales. 



258 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

All in all, I regret to say good-by to India. Its people are 
poor; its industries primitive; its religion atrocious; its climate 
generally oppressive, and yet, after all, there is something 
fascinating about the country. For one thing, there is a large 
infusion of Aryan blood among the people, and after one has 
spent several months among the featureless faces of the 
Chinese and Japanese, these Aryan-type faces are strangely 
attractive. The speech of the people, too, is picturesque 
beyond that of almost any other folk, as readers of Kipling 
have come to know. It is very common for a beggar to caU 
out, "Oh, Protector of the Poor, you are my father and 
mother, help me, help me." 

"I salute you," said our old guide at the Kutab Minar, 
speaking in his native Hindustani, which my friend interpreted 
for me. "I know that you are the kings of the realm, but I 
have eaten your salt before, and I am willing to eat it again." 

At the end, of course, he wished a tip. "But ask him why 
I should give him anything," I said to my friend. 

Replying, he mentioned first the number of his children, the 
blindness of his wife, and then dropped into the picturesque 
native plea: "Besides, you are my father and mother, the 
king of the realm, and if I may not look to you, to whom 
shall I look?" 

"Well, so much lying ought to be worth four annas," I said, 
and left him happier with the coin. 

There is one thing, of course, that would never do: it would 
never do to write about India without saying something about 
lions, tigers, and snakes. Last of all, therefore, let me come 
to this topic. 

I didn't see any tigers, let me say frankly, except those in 
cages — though there was one in Calcutta which had slain men 
and women before they caught him, and whose titanic fury 
as he lunged against his cage-bars, gnashing at the men before 
him, I shall never forget. A jackal howled at my room-door 
in Jeypore one night; between Jeypore and Bombay monkeys 



LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK 259 

were as thick as rabbits were in the old county where I was 
reared; in Delhi only lack of time prevented me from getting 
interested in a leopard hunt not many miles away; en route to 
Darjeeling I saw a wild elephant staked out in the woods near 
where he had evidently been caught; and near Kiera Kalan 
I saw wild deer leaping with their matchless grace across the 
level plains. 

"In my district," one missionary told me, "five or six 
people a month are killed by tigers and panthers and even 
more by snakes. One panther carried off a man from my 
kitchen. We found his body half-eaten in the jungle. It is 
customary when a body is found in this condition for hunters 
to gather around it and await the return of the tiger or 
panther. He will come back when hungry, and there is no other 
way so sure for getting a man-eater." 

As for snakes, I may mention that when I spent the night 
with a friend in Madura I was shown a place near the house 
where a deadly cobra had been seen (his bite kills in twenty 
minutes), while upon retiring I was given the comforting 
assurance that it was not safe to put my foot on the floor at 
night without having a light in the room! 

As I rode out with Dr. J. P. Jones, of Pasamaila, he pointed 
to a grassy mound near the roadside and said. 

"See that grave over there? There's rather an interestmg 
story connected with it which I'll tell you. One day about 
four years ago three snake-charmers came to my house, and 
as I had an American friend and his son with me, I decided for 
the boy's sake to have them try their art. Only two of the 
men had flutes, but one went into my garden and one took up 
his post on another side of the house, and began to play. It 
wasn't long before one called out, 'Cobra!' and sure enough 
there was the snake, which he captured; but on coming back he 
declared that he had been bitten. In fact, he showed a bruise, 
but I knew that snake-charmers counterfeit these bites, so 
I would not believe him. Then the other charmer also cried 



260 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

'Cobra!' and captured another snake. They showed me 
the fangs of each serpent, and I gave them four annas. I 
also offered them four annas more if they would kill the ser- 
pents; but of course they would not. 'Man kill cobra, cobra 
kill man,' is one of their sayings. And so they left, but the 
man who captured the first snake hadn't gone twenty steps 
before he fell in convulsions and died. He had really been 
bitten, and that is his grave which you see there." 
Madura, India. 




XXVI 

WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 

UT, after all, what may the Orient teach us? The 
inquiry is a pertinent one. Perhaps it is all the 
more pertinent because, while acknowledging that 
the old East may learn much from the young West, 
we are ordinarily little inclined to look to the Orient for in- 
struction for ourselves. In fact, we are not inclined to look 
anywhere. 

That the germ and promise of all the new Japan was in 
the oath taken by the young Mikado in 1868, "to seek out 
knowledge in all the world," we are ready to admit, and we 
are also ready to admit the truth of what Dr. Timothy Richard 
said to me in Peking last November. "This revolutionary 
progress in China has come about," he remarked, "because 
for twenty years China has been measuring herself with other 
countries. It is a comparative view of the world that is 
remaking the empire." 

In our own case unfortunately, certain natural conditions 
as well, perhaps, as the excessive "Ego in our Cosmos," con- 
spire to keep us from this corrective "comparative view of 
ths world." We are not hemmed about by rival world-powers, 
whose activities we are compelled to study, as is the case with 
almost every European nation. Barring the Philippines (and 
their uncertain value) we have no far-flung battle line to lure 
our vision beyond borders. And thus far our growing home 
markets have been so remunerative that not even commerce 
has induced us to look outward, with the incidental results of 

261 



262 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

bringing us to realize our defects and remedy them, our strong 
points and emphasize them. 

For these reasons, I made my trip through the Orient with 
an increased desire to bring home the lessons its long experi- 
ence should teach us. And now that I come to summarize 
these lessons I find a single note running through all — from 
beginning to end. And this keynote may be given in a single 
word, Conservation: the conservation not only of our natural 
resources, but of racial strength and power, of industrial pro- 
ductiveness, of commercial opportunities, and of finer things 
of the spirit. 

Taking up first the matter of natural resources, I may 
mention that hardly anything that I saw on my entire trip 
burned itself more deeply into my memory than the heavy 
penalty that the Celestial Empire is now paying for the neglect 
of her forests in former years. 

In the country north of Peking I found river valley after 
river valley once rich and productive but now become an 
abomination of desolation — covered with countless tons of 
sand and stone brought down from the treeless mountain- 
sides. So long as these slopes were forest-clad, the decaying 
leaves and humus gave a sponge-like character to the soil upon 
them, and it gave out the water gradually to the streams below. 
Now, however, the peaks are in most cases only enormous 
rock-piles, the erosion having laid waste the country round- 
about; or else they are mixtures of rock and earth rent by 
gorges through which furious torrents rush down immediately 
after each rainfall, submerging once fruitful plains with rock 
and infertile gully-dirt. Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese 
peasant once cultivated broad and level fields in such river 
valleys, he is now able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches 
by piling the rock in heaps and saving a few intervening 
arable remnants from the general soil-wreck. 

Especially memorable was the ruin — if one may call it 
such — of a once deep river, its bed now almost filled with 



WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 26S 

sand and rock, that I crossed on my little Chinese donkey not 
far from the Nankou Pass and the Great Wall. Even the 
splendid arches of a bridge, built to span its ancient flood, were 
almost submerged in sand. Instead of the constant stream 
of water that once gladdened the lowlands, there is in each 
rainy season a mad torrent that leaves a ruinous deposit be- 
hind, and, later, long weeks when the river-bed is as dry as a 
desert. So it was when I saw it last fall; and the old stone 
bridge, almost sand-covered li^e an Egyptian ruin, was at 
once a melancholy monument to the gladness and fertility of 
a vanished era, and an argument for forest-conservation 
that should carry conviction to all who see it. 

The next day as I rode amid the strange traffic of Nankou 
Pass I found this argument translated into even more directly 
human terms. For of the scores of awkward-moving camels 
and quaint-looking Mongolian horses and donkeys that I 
saw homeward-bound after their southward trip, a great number 
were carrying little bags of coal — dearly bought fuel to be 
sparingly used through the long winter's cold in quantities 
just large enough to cook the meagre meals, or in extreme 
weather to keep the poor peasants from actually freezing. 
Only in the rarest cases are the Chinese able to use fuel for 
warming themselves; they can afford only enough for cook- 
ing purposes. 

Yet in sight of the peasant's home, perhaps — in any case, 
not far away — are mountain peaks too steep for cultivation, 
but which with wise care of the tree-growth would have 
provided fuel for thousands and tens of thousands, and at a 
fraction of the price at which wood or coal must now be bought. 

Japan, Korea, and India — the whole Orient in fact — ^bear 
witness to the importance of the forestry messages which 
Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt have been drumming 
into our more or less uncaring ears for a decade past. When 
I reached Yokohama I found it impossible to get into the 
northern part of the island of Hondo because of the flood- 



264 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

damage to the railroads, and the lives of several friends of 
mine had been endangered in the same disaster. The dams 
of bamboo-bound rocks that I found men building near Nikko 
and Miyanoshita by way of remedy may not amount to much; 
but there is much hope in the general programme for refor- 
esting the desolated areas, which I found the Japanese De- 
partment of Agriculture and Commerce actively prosecuting. 
Here is a good lesson for America. In Korea, however, the 
Japanese lumbermen, even in very recent years, have given 
little thought to the morrow and with such results as might 
be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citi- 
zens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient 
walls, remarked, "When I was young this was called the 
Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you 
can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places 
nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great 
damage was done by overflows right here in Seoul." 

Yet another kind of conservation to which our people in 
Occidental lands need to give more earnest heed is the con- 
servation of the individual wealth of the people. The waste- 
fulness of the average American is apparent enough from a 
comparison of conditions here with conditions in Europe — 
when I came back from my first European trip I remarked 
that "Europe would live on what America wastes" — but a 
comparison of conditions in America with those in the Orient 
is even more to our discredit. In Lafcadio Hearn's books on 
Japan we find a glorification of the Japanese character that is 
unquestionably overdone on the whole, but in his contrast 
between the wasteful display of fashion's fevered followers 
in America and the ideals of simple living that distinguished old 
Japan, there is a rebuke for us whose justice we cannot gainsay. 
Take an old Japanese sage like Baron Shibusawa, who, like 
Count Okuma, it seems might well have been one of Plu- 
tarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention the 
extravagance of America as the thing that impressed him more 



WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 265 

than anything else in traveHng in our country. "To spend so 
much money in making a mere railroad station palatial as 
you have done in Washington, for example, seems to me 
uneconomic," he declared. 

What most impressed him and other Oriental critics with 
whom I talked, be it remembered, was the wastefulness of 
expenditures not for genuine comforts but for fashion and dis- 
play — the vagaries of idle rich women who pay high prices 
for half-green strawberries in January but are hunting some 
other exotic diet when the berries get deliciously ripe in May, 
and ¥/ho rave over an American Beauty in December but have 
no eyes for the i ull-blown glory of the open-air roses in June. 
It is such unnatural display that most grates against the "moral 
duty of simplicity of life," as Eastern sages have taught it. 

"When I was in the Imperial University here in Tokyo," 
a Japanese newspaper man said to me, "my father gave me 
six yen a month, $3 American money. I paid for room, light, 
and food $1.20 a month; for tuition, 50 cents; for paper, 
books, etc., 30 cents; and this left me $1 for pocket money 
expenditures, including the occasional treat of eating potatoes 
with sugar ! " In such Spartan simplicity the victors of Muk- 
den, Liao-yang and Port Arthur were bred. 

The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, lyeyasu, 
whose tomb at Nikko situated at the end of a twenty-five 
mile avenue of giant cryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists, 
has expressed in two memorable sayings the Japanese concep- 
tion of the essential immorality of waste, of the regard that is 
due every product of human labor as being itself in some sense 
human or at least a throb with the blood of the toiler who has 
wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow. When vir- 
tual dictator of Japan, lyeyasu was seen smoothing out an 
old silk kakama. "I am doing this," he said, "not because 
of the worth of the garment in itself, but because of what it 
needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of some poor 
woman, and that is why I value it. If we do not think while 



266 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

using these things, of the toil and effort required to produce 
them,then our want of consideration puts us on a level with the 
beasts." Again, when opposing unnecessary purchases of 
costly royal garments, he declared. " When I think of the 
multitudes around me, and the generations to come after me, 
I feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods 
in my possession." 

No wonder Heam declares of this "cosmic emotion of hu- 
manity" which we lack that "we shall certainly be obliged to 
acquire it at a later date simply to save ourselves from ex- 
termination." 

The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the 
wastes of war and the wastes of excessive military expenditures 
is another lesson that one brings home from a study of con- 
ditions abroad. While our American jingoes are using Japan 
as a more or less effective bogy to work their purposes, peace 
advocates might perhaps even more legitimately hold it up 
as a "horrible example" to point their moral as to how war 
drains the national revenues and exhausts the national wealth. 
In the Mikado's empire the average citizen to-day must pay 
30 per cent, of his total income in taxes, the great propor- 
tion of this enormous national expenditure growing out of 
past wars and preparations for future wars. No wonder 
venerable Count Okuma, once Premier of the Empire, said 
to me: "I look for international arbitration to come not 
as a matter of sentiment but as a matter of cold financial 
necessity. Nations have labored for centuries to build up 
the civilization of to-day : it is unthinkable that its advantages 
must be largely sacrificed for the support of enormous non- 
productive armies and navies. That would be simply the 
Suicide of Civilization." 

For the lesson of all this I may quote the words of Dr. 
Timothy Richard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen 
in China, in the same conversation from which a fragment 
was quoted in the beginning of this article: 



WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 267 

"The world is going to be one before you die, sir," he said 
as we talked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden 
City. "We are living in the days of anarchy. Unite the 
ten leading nations; let all their armaments be united into one 
to enforce the decrees of the Supreme Court of the World. 
And since it will then be the refusal of recalcitrant nations to 
accept arbitration that will make necessary the maintenance 
of any very large armaments by these united nations, let 
them protect themselves by levying discriminating tariff 
duties against the countries that would perpetuate present 
conditions." 

All this I endorse. The necessity of preserving the national 
wealth from the wastes of war I regard as one of the most 
important lessons that we may get from the Orient. And 
yet I would not have the United States risk entering upon 
that military unpreparedness which must prove a fool's paradise 
until other great nations are brought to accept the principle 
of arbitration. The proper programme is to increase by tenfold 
— yes, a hundredfold — our personal and national efforts 
for arbitration, at the same time remembering that so long as 
the community of nations recognizes the Rule of Force we can- 
not secede and set up a reign of peace for ourselves. If it 
takes two to make a quarrel, it also takes two to keep a peace. 
We must be in terrible earnest about bringing in a new era, 
and yet we cannot commit the folly of trying to play the peace 
game by ourselves. It is not solitaire. 

Even more important, whether we consider it from the 
standpoint of the general weKare or as a matter of national de- 
fence, is the conservation of our physical stamina and racial 
strength. Whether the wars of the future are commercial or 
military it doesn't matter. The prizes will go to the people 
who are strong of body and clear of mind. "The first requi- 
site," said Herbert Spencer, " is a good animal," and not even 
the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the good animal 
■ — the power of physical vigor and hardness with its concomi- 



268 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

tant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring — from becom- 
ing a deciding factor in the struggle between nations and 
between races. It has been so from the dawn of history and it 
will ever be so. 

And just here we may question whether the growth of 
wealth and luxury in the United States is not tending here, as 
it has tended in all other nations, toward physical softness and 
deterioration. It may be argued on the contrary that while 
a few Occidental children are luxury -weakened, a great body 
of Oriental children are drudgery-weakened. But is there 
not much more reason to fear that in our case there is really 
decay at both ends of our social system — with the pampered 
rich children who haven't work enough, and with the hard- 
driven poor who have too much.? The overworking of the very 
young is certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia; 
and even in this matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as 
well, according to their lights, as we are. In China manu- 
facturing is not yet extensive enough for the problem to be 
serious; but in both Japan and India I found the government 
councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of conserving 
child-life, and grappling with different measures for the pro- 
tection of both child and women workers. My recollection is 
that the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were 
no girls) that I found at work in a Madras cotton mUl already 
have better legal protection than is afforded the child-workers 
in some of our American states. 

For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of 
the Oriental as the victim of enervating habits and more or less 
vicious forms of self-indulgence. But while this may have 
been true in the past, the tide is now definitely turning. Fifty 
years of agitation in the United States have probably accom- 
plished less to minimize intemperance among us than ten years 
of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in ridding China 
of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too 
late to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; 



WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 269 

too late to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the 
banks of the Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I 
found such notices as the following concerning morphine, 
cocaine and similar drugs: 

"In accordance with instructions received through the Inspector-General 
from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notifed that henceforth the impor- 
tation into China of cocaine ... or instruments for its use, except by 
foreign medical practitioners and foreign druggists for medical purposes, is 
hereby prohibited." 

And these foreign doctors handling cocaine are heavily 
bonded. The Chinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is 
little given to other forms of intemperance, is afire with new 
enthusiasm for athletics and for military training; and he is 
already so physically adaptable that I found him as hardy and 
untiringly energetic beneath an equatorial sun in Singapore 
as in the rigorous climate of north-central Manchuria. It 
made me wonder if the "meek who are to inherit the earth" 
in the end may not prove to be the Chinese! 

Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or 
if we realized more fully the keenness of the coming world- 
struggle for industrial supremacy, we might find our pa- 
triotism a stronger force in warding off some of the evils that 
now threaten us. In his address to the German navy. Em- 
peror William recently urged the importance of temperance 
because of the empire's need of strong, clear-headed men, 
unweakened by dissipation; and there can be little doubt that 
some such patriotic motive has had not a little to do with the 
anti-opium movement in awakening China. Certainly the 
Japanese with their almost fanatical love of country are easily 
influenced by such appeals, and keep such reasons in mind in 
the training of their young. "For the sake of the Emperor 
you must not drink the water from these condemned wells; 
for the sake of the Emperor you must observe these sanitary 
precautions — lest you start an epidemic and so weaken the 



270 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

Emperor's fighting forces!" So said the Japanese sanitary 
oflBcers in the war with Russia; and when the struggle ended 
Surgeon-General Takaki was able to boast in his oflBcial report: 

*' In the Spanish-American War fourteen men died from disease to one from 
bullets. We have established a record of four deaths from disease to one from 
bullets." 

In studying these Eastern peoples one is also led inevitably 
to such reflections as Mr. Roosevelt gave utterance to in his 
Romanes lectures a few months ago. Not only are the Orientals 
schooled from their youth up to endure hardness like good 
soldiers, but their natural increase contrasts strikingly with 
the steadily decreasing birth-rate of our French and English 
stocks. In Japan I soon came to remark that it looked almost 
as unnatural to see a woman between twenty and forty with- 
out a baby on her back as it would to see a camel without a 
hump; and Kipling's saying about the Japanese "four-foot 
child who walks with a three-foot child who is holding the 
hand of a two-foot child who carries on her back a one-foot 
child" came promptly to mind. In view of these things it 
is not surprising to learn that in the last fifty years Japan has 
increased in population, through the birth rate alone, "as fast 
as the United States has gained from the birth rate plus her 
enormous immigration." The racial fertility of the Chinese 
is also well known; a Chinaman without sons to worship his 
spirit when he dies is not only temporarily discredited but 
eternally doomed. As for India, that every Hindu girl at 
fourteen must be either a wife or a widow is a common saying, 
and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" will recall the 
ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also a 
mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen. 

Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the title of his new 
book, "The Conflict of Color" — the seeming foreordination 
of some readjustment of racial relations if present tendencies 
continue — when he asserts that while the white races double 



WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 271 

in eighty yejars, the yellow or brown double in sixty, and 
the black in forty. 

This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of 
racial relations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are 
the quahties that have given the white race the leadership 
thus far? And what may we do for the conservation of these 
qualities? 

There are, of course, certain basic and fundamental reasons 
for white leadership that I need not elaborate. For one thing, 
there is the tonic air of democratic ideals in which long gen- 
erations of white men have Uved and developed as contrasted 
with the stifling absolutism of the East. There is also our 
emphasis upon the worth of the Individual, our conception of 
the sacredness of personality, as compared with the Oriental 
lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard for the 
family and the State. And even more important perhaps 
is the fact that the white man has had a religion that has 
taught — even if somewhat confusedly at times — that "man 
is man and master of his fate," that he is not a plaything of 
destiny, but a responsible son of God with enormous possibilities 
for good or evil, whereas the Oriental has been the victim of 
benumbing fatalism that has made him indifferent in industry 
and achievement, though it has given him a greater reckless- 
ness in war. It would also be difficult to exaggerate the 
influence which our radically different estimate of woman has 
had upon Western civilization. And here we have to con- 
sider not only woman's own direct contributions to progress, 
but also the indirect influence of our regard for woman, not 
as an inferior and a plaything, but as a comrade and help- 
meet. How frequently the ideal of English chivalry — 

" To love one maiden only, cleave to her. 
To worship her by years of noble deeds " — 

has been the inspiration of the best that men of our race 
have wrought, it needs only a glance at our Uterature to 



272 WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP 

suggest. These things are indeed basic and fundamental 
and the question of their conservation, the preservation of 
the ideals of the Occident as compared with those of the Orient, 
is supremely important not only to us as a nation but to all 
our human race. But when, one comes to consider only the 
sheer economic causes of the difference between Oriental 
poverty and Occidental plenty, it seems to me impossible to 
escape the conviction, already expressed and elaborated that 
it is mainly a matter of tools and knowledge, education 
and machinery. 

In the Orient every man is producing as little as possible; 
in the Occident he is producing as much as possible. That is 
the case in a nutshell. 

With better knowledge and better tools, half the people 
now engaged in food-production in Asia could produce all 
the food that the entire rural population now produces, and 
the other half could be released for manufacturing — thereby 
doubhng the earning power and the spending power of the 
whole population. 

It is universal education and modem machinery, far more 
than virgin resources, that have made America rich and power- 
ful. Let her make haste then to learn this final lesson that the 
Orient teaches — the necessity of conserving in the fullest 
degree all the powers that have given us industrial supremacy: 
the power of the trained brain and the cunning hand rein- 
forced by all the magic strength that we may get from our 
Briarean "Slave of the Lamp," modern machinery. We 
must thoroughly educate all our people. Was it not an Orien- 
tal prophet who wrote: "My people are destroyed for lack 
of knowledge?" In China only 1 per cent, of the people can 
now read and write, and the highest hope of the government 
is that 5 per cent, may be Hterate by 1917. In India only 
5 per cent, can read and write. In Japan for centuries pist, 
the education of the common man has also been neglected, 
but she is now compelling every child to go into the schools. 



WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US 273 

and her industrial system will doubtless be revolutionized as 
a result. 

In no case must we forget that education, if it is to be 
efifective, must train for efficiency, must link itself with life 
and work, must be practical. I had thought of the movement 
for relating the school to industry as being confined to America 
and Europe. But when I landed in Japan I found the edu- 
cational authorities there as keenly alive to the importance of 
the movement as ours in America; in China I found that 
the old classical system of education has been utterly aban- 
doned within a decade; in the Philippines it was the boast 
of the Commissioner of Education that the elementary schools 
in the islands give better training for agriculture and in- 
dustry than those in the United States; and in India the school 
authorities are earnestly at work upon the same problem. 

Knowledge and tools must go hand in hand. If this has 
been important heretofore it is doubly important now that 
we must face in an ever-increasing degree the rivalry of awaken- 
ing peoples who are strong with the strength that comes from 
struggle with poverty and hardship, and who have set them- 
selves to master and apply all our secrets in the coming world- 
struggle for industrial supremacy and racial readjustment. 



THE END 



INDEX 



American commerce abroad, 87-8, 

91-2 
American goods sold lower abroad, 

101 
Ancestor worship, Japan, 7-8 
Area and population, Manchuria, 

78; Philippines, 163; India, 211 
Artistic Japanese, 40, 48-9 



Diseases and sanitation, 56-64, 72, 

135, 170-71 
Dress, Japanese, 10-11; Indian, 216 



Education, 272; Japanese, 17; Chi- 
nese, 99. 109-11; Filipino, 168-9; 
Indian, 210 



Beans in Manchuria, 75-6 
Beasts, India's wild, 258-60 
Benares, 202 
Boxer,.troubles, 125-26 



Camels in China, 116-17 

Canton, 142 

Caste system, 226-35; effect on 

labor, 229; robber caste, 231; 

defended, 232 
Child marriage in India, 237-8 
Children, Hindu, 223-4 
China, premonitions of revolution, 

93, 102-6. 
China Sea, 153 
Chinese hardiness, 187-8 
Chinese immigration, 114-15 
Christian vs. Hindu philosophy, 199, 

204-5 
Christian vs. Oriental philosophy, 

271 
Cocoanut planting, 189 
Confucianism, 103 
Conservation of forests, 262-4 
Cooperative credit societies, Japan, 

25; India, 222 
Crops — Rice. 23-5; cotton, 23. 78, 

140, 168, 254-7; India's crops, 

219 
Currency reform in China, 97-98 



Elephants, Stories about, 193-5 
Extravagance, American, 264-6 



Factory child labor, 268; Japan, 33 

Family government, 7, 149 

Famines in India, 218-20 

Farm animals, Japan, 22; Man- 
churia, 74; Philippines, 159 

Farming — Japan, 21-28; Manchur- 
ian, 76; Chinese, 122, 126-8, 143- 
41, 177; Philippine, 155-6, 165; 
Indian, 218-23, 255-7; tools, 23, 
190, 218; houses, 26, 127, 156, 212 

Fatalism, 227-8 

Filipino character, 172 

Filipino houses, 156 

Foot binding, Chinese, 133-34 

Funeral and burial customs, 77, 124, 
128, 144-5, 203-4, 243 



Ganges, 203 

German commercial activity, 190 

Government, Japanese, 4; Korea's 

corrupt, 65-7; Chmese, 108 
Great Walls, 120-21 



Himalayas, The, 208-9 
Hindu gods and goddesses, 200 
Hindu village described, 212 



275 



276 



mDEX 



India, English rule in, 248-52 
India's diversity of races, 248 
Individual, repression of, 55-6 
Industrial efficiency, 37, 40, 141 



Japan control in Korea, 67-8; in 

Manchuria, 78-92 
Japanese city described, 9-11 
Japanese-Russian War, 70-72; 90-91 



Korea, 60-69 



Language — Japanese spoken, 3; 

written, 9-10; Chinese, 129-30 
Lawrence, Sir Henry, 246 
Love of nature, Japanese, 27 



Machinery, Asia's refusal to use, 183 
Manchuria's fertility, 73-4 
Manila, 154 

Manufacturing, Japan, 31, 34-47 
Marriage customs, Japanese, 5-7, 

139; Korean, 63; Chinese, 134: 

Indian, 236-43 
Missionary work, 59, 69; Japan, 51; 

Korea, 68; Philippines, 164 
Moral standards, 134, 136 
Music, 5 



Odd customs, Japan, 3-6, 12; Ko- 
rean, 65 

Oku ma. Count, interviewed, 44-5; 
266 

Open door in Manchuria, The, 78-92 

Opium, China's crusade against. 
94-6; 108 



Parcels post, 101 

Peking, Glimpses of, 123-25 

Perry's Expedition, 58 

Persecution of Christians, 51-2, 125-6 

Philippine government, 167-70 

Philippine resources, 165-7 

Philippine scenery, 155-6 



"Pidgin English," 150-51 
Politeness, Japanese, 12, 13 
Postal savings banks, 109 
Poverty of Oriental people, 175 

210, 252 
Practical education, S9, 273 
Punishments, Chinese, 145-6 

Bacial fertility, 7, 11, 270-71 

Railways, Manchurian, 83-6; Chinese, 
139-40 

Rangoon, 190-91 

Religions, Shintoism, 49; Buddhism, 
49-50, 151, U£-S; CcLiucianism, 
lSG-31; Hinduism, U8-it(.8, 227 

Roads, 74; in 1 Lilippices, 171 

Rubber speculation, 188 

School term, Japan, 17-18 

Size of farms, Japan, 21; China, 126 

Slavery in China, lb2 

Social gradations, Japanese, 16 

"Squeeze" svsttm in China, 96, 112 

Stoiy, A Chinese, 146-7 

Superstitions, 77, 128-9 

Taj Mahal described, 244-5 
Tariff — Japanese, 30. 44-6; Chi- 
nese, 112 
Taxes in Japan, 30 
Torrens land titles, S8, 169-70 
Tropical vegetation, 186 

Wages — Japan, 29, 34, 36, 42, 174; 

China, 126, 141, 174. 177; Burma, 

196; India, 210, 223, 253-4 
War spirit, 267; Japan, 35, 72. 266; 

China, 111-12 
Wedding, A Hindu, 239 
Welfare work in Japanese factories 

31-3 
Woman's degraded position, 271; 

Japan, 6, 52-6, India, 236-44 
Women laborers, SO, 43, 177, 253-4 
T\ u ling lang interviewed, 139 

Yang -bans. The, 66 
Yangtze River, 1S8-9 



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